


Seven Minutes In Hell

by meratrishoslee



Series: Seven Minutes Wherever [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: ... with a blend of both canons, Biting, Canon Compliant, Chastity Device, Gender Identity, M/M, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Pining, Seven Minutes In Heaven Game, Sexual Identity, Sexual Inexperience, for like 6000 years, uhh... kinda?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-04-23 14:51:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19153243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meratrishoslee/pseuds/meratrishoslee
Summary: He bent and curled his left hand around the pale ear he couldn't see in the dark of the broom closet to mutter: "Don't move, don't speak, don't make a sound. Don't even breathe hard."But, oh – I'm one to talk, he thought. Already in the too-tiny confines smelling of floor wax and disinfectant he felt like his lungs were running out of air.Think of anything, anything else – how'd – how'd we wind up here?!





	1. How We Got Here

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Meta: Why is Aziraphale so gay?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17899196) by [DictionaryWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites). 



> Brain threw up a random crack-fic prompt of "Seven Minutes In Heaven".  Coupled with the knowledge that Aziraphale has a collection of Wilde first editions, and [literally everything else in this extensive and wonderful document](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17899196)   (hattip to [DictionaryWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites)) and away we go.
> 
> This would happen sometime between the Anti-Christ turning 5 and the Apocalypse, no other specific time.
> 
> Barely beta'd, barely edited, barely written. Anything good, blame it on DictionaryWrites's fantastic article and my squad for egging me on; any errors remain solely mine.

In the first few milliseconds, Crowley became aware of the fact that the lips beneath his right palm seemed cold enough to frost his skin. He bent and curled his left hand around the pale ear he couldn't see in the dark of the broom closet to mutter: "Don't move, don't speak, don't make a sound. Don't even breathe hard."

But, oh – I'm one to talk, he thought. Already in the too-tiny confines smelling of floor wax and disinfectant he felt like his lungs were running out of air.

Carefully he moved his hand, bracing himself against the wall behind Aziraphale's head. No more lips to frustrate him, to cause him to burn more than your average demon already did. Then Crowley made the mistake of inhaling slowly, and got his sinuses full of the scent he'd recognize anywhere and had known as well as his own for the last six thousand years.

Think of anything, anything else – how'd – how'd we wind up here?!

Gabriel, that's how. Gabriel on the sidewalk, with his big stupid head and his perfect suit lines, with his smug smile and little angel-wings lapel pin. Maybe fifteen meters away when the demon's hand was on the brass door-pull of the pub. Were they looking for him and Aziraphale? Had he seen him, recognized him?

He'd dashed by their regular table and caught the angel up by his wrist, the shock of contact sending a ripple of lightning along his nerves. For as many times as they'd met on park benches and in restaurants, participated in the Arrangement and done their minor favors for each other, they both seemed to make a point of not touching each other.

Wonder why, his fevered brain answered sourly.

The angel was quick on the uptake, as usual – and he could move as fast when he wanted. They'd both got to the emergency exit in the back of the small kitchen at the same instant.

It was locked.

"Shocking breach of safety precautions!" Aziraphale had hissed angrily. Crowley, like any cornered animal, was already working on the next option. Now careful to grab a fistful of sleeve he pushed his friend ahead of him, back to the hallway space that separated pub kitchen from pub proper.

The door on one side was a restroom and that was no good: there was only the one and somebody would want it soon enough -- it **was**  a pub. The door on the other side had a tidy brass sign that said "Custodial" and Crowley swung it open and shoved them both into the cramped space underneath the stairs that led to the upper terrace seating.

They'd bumped the shelves on the way in, the last highest echelons of his mind reported. That's why there was a splash of pine-scented disinfectant down the back of his jacket and the crumbles of that treated sawdust they use to get up vomit crunching under (and perhaps in) his snakeskin shoes.

And that's it, his brain said – and gave up, and joined the rest of his corporeal form in contemplation of the angelic body he had pinned to the wall.

There were noises outside the door. Regular pub noises? Gabriel and Michael on the hunt?

The door was just the slightest bit off plumb, so that a crack of light came from around three of its sides – not enough to illuminate detail, only to relieve general darkness into shades of gray.

So Crowley felt, rather than saw, Aziraphale's hand come up. With as little noise as the demon would have begged, the angel's hand found the doorknob... and turned the lock.

The closet locks from the inside? What do they **do**  in this pub?

Little flickers of thought skittered away again as the hand that had locked the door now wrapped around Crowley's back and came to rest in the small of his spine. It was, a second later, joined by another hand.

Crowley exhaled slowly, felt his breath bounce back from the angel's cheek. This is fine, it's all fine. Of course. He's just holding me up. We're crammed in here together so tightly; if one of us trips he'd bring the other down.

Noises outside, closer. Gabriel's voice. Stern, yet confused. Concerned.

Wait a minute, Crowley's inner "devil's advocate" replied. We're crammed in here together – and Aziraphale's got his back to the solid wall. The shelves are directly behind me, and I'm hoping that's a mop handle against my right shoulder. Where the heaven would there be room to fall down?

Wait a minute, something else in Crowley added. Is that his thigh between mine?

He leaned his hip in and felt the angel stir, felt his chin lift in something that was not quite a cautionary gesture.

Yes, that was his leg. His thigh. High up. In between his own. And his hands, behind his back. And his arms, around him.

Slow inhale now. Nothing wrong, other than vomit sawdust in the shoe and a Pine-Sol stain. Nothing to worry about. Gabriel will get bored and go away. Life will go on, so to speak. Just keep calm and wait.

Not all of Crowley got this message.

It's true that angels (and demons) have no gender unless they choose to exert themselves.

Well, for some reason Crowley almost always had. Exerted himself, that is. Specifically around Aziraphale.

Is there a defense for the indefensible? What reason would there be to equip a cock and balls around what should be an ancient foe, an undying enemy – except perhaps that it lent a certain weight to the swagger and filled out the crotch of his slim black trousers?

(is that all? asked his heart)

Except that now said equipage was responding, and between the distraction of being hunted and of his angel being so close to him

(pinned against him, chest and hip, thigh between thighs, surely he's gonna notice, he's gonna feel it, oh my Somebody help)

he couldn't quite summon the concentration to will the whole setup away.

Slowly again, so slowly that there was no whisper of fabric against fabric, not even the slightest noise: one of the hands in the small of Crowley's back came around his body and up between them. It brought itself gently to rest against Crowley's cheek and he ground his teeth to keep from groaning.

The first Fall Crowley had experienced had been a multi-million light year swan-dive into brimstone.

His second Fall was only the length of a few centimeters, and hurt a thousand times more.

He leaned his forehead down against the blessed coolness of his angel's skin. Aziraphale's hand on his cheek stroked softly – I know, I know, Aziraphale answered without words. I know.

In the next few milliseconds Crowley noticed two more things: that Aziraphale's lips found his own unerring in the darkness, so used to each other from across millennia that there was no fumbling – and that there was another stirring against his own thigh, from the fork of Aziraphale's immaculate cream-colored trousers.

"Seven Minutes In Heaven" – hadn't he read about it with some bemusement in the 70's, in one magazine or another? Human children these days, getting into closets of their own free will. Presumably doing things to each other. Maybe just pretending it, to the jibes and catcalls of their peers on the other side of the door.

Smooth movement that made no noise: the angel's other hand slid around his side and under his jacket. Crowley found himself held possessively at cheek and hip as the kiss deepened.

Oh, angel. My angel.

I'm in Hell.

Door closed across the hall from their closet. Gabriel's laugh like a wrought-iron spear through the demon's eardrums; footsteps moving away.

Aziraphale's tongue darted between Crowley's lips, teasing him, tasting like meringue, cool like sherbet. Burning like the holiest of holy water.

He ground his pelvis reflexively and felt that raise of the angel's chin again, coupled with a quick intake of breath that would have been a laugh, if they'd been...

What, then? "Safe"? "Alone"? They were each the property of their respective governing entities; there was no such thing as privacy. As personal.

Maybe "Custodial" was as good as they were ever gonna get.

It wasn't what Crowley had ever imagined, in the volcano-hot corridors of his innermost soul. It wasn't spreading his sweets-loving bookish little Aziraphale out onto crimson silk sheets in a massive bed to ravish every inch of him, down to the spaces between his toes and behind his earlobes, to possess him utterly.

The demon was reminded in the breathless oven space of the broom closet that he'd never ravished anyone in his existence – and that, if anyone in here was demonstrating ownership currently, it was not him.

Aziraphale's hands: he thought he might die of them. That one on his hip, holding him where he was. The other slipping down also inside the jacket, up his side with only the material of his dress shirt sliding between their fleshes. The kiss was ending only for the angel to nuzzle along his jaw, reach up and press forehead to the demon's temple.

Crowley swallowed hard. Felt Aziraphale's cheek crinkle in a smile.

Too much. Crowley trembled with suppressed reaction and over-stimulation; he bent all the way down and took one of Aziraphale's celestial-scented suit lapels between his teeth and bit it hard.

His angel pressed his lips slowly down the straining cord of his neck: move and press... move and press... I know, said every little affectionate kiss in body language Crowley could only half-translate, it being so new. I know... I know... I know...

I know what you're feeling. I know how it feels. I understand it. It's okay. You won't die of it, this tension and bliss.

The angel's hand, sliding down the inside of Crowley's thigh, found the head of the demon's treacherous cock and his fingertips circled it, caressing the ridge.

You'll die of **this** , that hand said.

His spine bucked; his arms and shoulders caught him before he hit the shelves behind him (again). They caught him by burying his hands in Aziraphale's hair, clenching there, not possessive but desperate and lost.

The angel held completely still. So did the demon, listening for noises. Regular pub noises? Someone waiting for the loo?

Then Aziraphale exhaled slow, breath puffing across Crowley's collarbone, exposed where his kisses had pushed the shirt collar aside. Crowley found him matching his breathing to the other's example. His throat was dry and he swallowed again. It made a click that sounded like a match flaring. Lighting the long fuse to some massive bomb.

Aziraphale exhaled again, a soft little sigh. His well-manicured fingers squeezed that piece of flesh, gently then more firmly. They rubbed their way down along the underside of its length, barely blocked by the linen suit pants.

Crowley thrashed in something like agony. Don't bite, don't bite, he reminded himself, daring to press his own mouth to Aziraphale's ear, closed lips, like a kiss. He felt the other give a little nod – yes, I like it.

Fingers dipped and swirled – do more and I'll do more.

Breathing through his mouth was worse than through his nose; this close Crowley could taste his angel in each tentative kiss of earlobe and cheek and temple. More, more, more. He let his top and bottom halves intellectually divorce each other – he found Aziraphale's mouth and engaged it with more pretended confidence, as his hips thrust helpless and eager against the other's palm.

Crowley strained to Aziraphale's steady exhalations, nerves a flurry of signals in the greyness under the stairs – yes, and this, and here, and now, go on, more. The angel's clever hand a metronome-rhythm around which the demon's theme was played until the answer came back yes, this, yes, this, with growing intensity.

Then even the angel's breath grew ragged as some ineffable moment came closer and closer within the both of them, and Crowley thought he caught a glimpse of why humans did what they did with what they had between their thighs. Why it mattered so much, sometimes.

Yes... yes... this... soon... oh, Somebody... please!

A sudden knock on the broom closet door, thunderously loud. Then a person outside twisted the doorknob only to find it locked.

"Five more minutes," Aziraphale broke free and laughed aloud in a sing-song carol to the would-be intruder, seeming cool as a cucumber.

"Make it two," the outsider grumbled. "We have a technicolor yawn in the terrace, needs dealin' with."

"...what?" Crowley managed a few seconds later, groggy with denied pleasure, voice barely above a murmur.

"Someone vomited at the upstairs bar. Made a beast of themselves, the poor thing."

Aziraphale must have reached up and pulled the cord, because the bulb came on in the broom closet. There was light, anyway.

"... how... how did you-"

"I know my favorite pubs **very**  well," Aziraphale answered in soft tones. His eyes were dancing with a silver spark in them; his lips were swollen from the pressure of Crowley's hand.

And from their kisses. Crowley felt like laughing, felt like crying. The metronome had stilled; the moment was gone.

"Do you know," the angel continued archly, "that all my Oscar Wilde first editions are signed?"

He raised his eyebrows as if this was supposed to mean something to the demon. His tongue flicked against the back of his front teeth as it usually did when he was remembering something like the crêpes from the French Revolution.

In the next moment the angel was back to himself; the only sign that **something**  had happened in the closet was the perfect half-circle imprint of Crowley's teeth-points on his right lapel.

He's gonna be pissed about that later, Crowley thought. Maybe. He tried to straighten out his own somewhat mussed state, not caring much at the moment.

"Come on, my dear," and Aziraphale reached for the doorknob, flipped the lock, and pushed it open, gesturing the demon out before him. Cleaning up the spilled chemicals with a glance and a quick miracle. "Gabriel's been gone ages."

Crowley stepped out into the hall and then back, letting Aziraphale lead him to the front door, close enough to reach for his hand but not ever daring. Knowing he'd get no more answer than what he'd got.

Some things can only find expression in the dark, after all.

I shouldn't have slept through all the nineteenth century, he thought as they emerged into the sunset glow. I shouldn't have left you so alone, my angel.

What did Oscar Wilde teach you, that you haven't been able to teach me yet?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Somebody (-- find me, Somebody, to Love)
> 
> The closet locks from the inside because the pub manager is having an affair. The emergency exit is locked because he thinks the waitresses spend too much time hanging out in the alley. If you needed to know.
> 
> I'm a subscriber to the "Aziraphale had a hot wild time with the bohemians for several centuries and Crowley is a virgin, emotionally at least" theory. I'm also a main fan of the "Of the two of them, Crowley figures out his feelings first -- but only Aziraphale has an idea of what needs to be done with them" theory.
> 
> Reading body language is sexy; I think they get it better than the Chattering Order of Saint Beryl.
> 
> "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
> 
> I love these characters and I want them to be happy together forever, but I figure they're not going to get it (or Get It) until after the Apocalypse.


	2. On The Other Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angels didn't have emotions, after all. 
> 
> Not like these ones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be advised: herein I describe the various games, experiments, and adventures I believe a being would have if they didn't come "equipped" with a gender or a sexual preference, who could and would try out just about anything to see if they like it. For us mere mortals it can be so much more a serious thing. Aziraphale understands that it's very important to humans -- and it also takes him millennia of searching to narrow down the things that bring him the most joy about it.
> 
> The below is not intended to reflect any human experience with gender fluidity or sexuality; I have tried to be as respectful of all as I think Aziraphale himself would be.

In the first few milliseconds, Aziraphale came to realize that the palm pressed tightly over his lips was burning with a delicious heat that radiated out over his face. The demon leaned toward him in the gloom of the dark closet to murmur: "Don't move, don't speak, don't make a sound. Don't even breathe hard."

Difficult to breathe hard with half your breathing apparatus covered and the air reeking of fake pine scent, the angel wanted to answer – but the tension in the other's body stopped him. He'd rarely ever seen Crowley in such a state of distress, and he knew Crowley never did anything without a reason.

It might not be a **reasonable**  reason, and Crowley might not even know his own reason, but he always did **have**  a reason.

There were noises outside the door, and the reason became clear; Aziraphale's ears were sharp enough to discern what had put the fear of Somebody into Crowley. Somehow and somewhy, Gabriel was in this, Aziraphale's most favorite of pubs.

Crammed against a rough wooden wall, pinned by the weight of the demon's body, their thighs intermingled, Aziraphale did the most reasonable thing he could think of.

His hand came up. With as little noise as Crowley would have demanded, he found the doorknob... and turned the lock.

To understand this we have to go back and examine: how'd we wind up here?

_Crowley had come sprinting into the pub up to their regular table and grabbed him by the wrist, and--_

No, further back than that. Practically almost all of the way back.

A thousand years after he'd managed to "misplace" a certain weapon with fiery qualities, Aziraphale had gotten curious, about how humanity in general was doing. And what they were doing. And why they were doing it. I mean, wasn't this all supposed to be about them? The Great War, with the Souls Of All Mankind as the First and Last Battlefields, both Large and Small?

Sure. But it seemed that, in general, most of the celestial host didn't bother themselves much with the actual, you know, people.

So the angel set out to bother himself with some people.

The word "angel" used to just mean "messenger," you may know. And it was easy in those early days to be a messenger and deliver a message that might not otherwise have arrived. Especially if you were so much more **swift** than the average mortal person on a regular camel.

And good news, Aziraphale discovered, was so much more welcomed than bad news.

Understandable; everyone wants to be good, if they can be. It's way better to be Good than Bad, of course.

So there was feasting, which was great! And there was drinking, which was wonderful! And there was hospitality!

Hospitality was... interesting!

Turns out back in those early days, hospitality overnight in a stranger's home where you've been the messenger of good news could occasionally include choosing the private company of one of their young women. Or of their young men, if you wanted that instead.

The first time the question was put to him, Aziraphale had to do that whole "pausing the world" thing to think about it for a moment.

Well, he generally thought of himself as a 'he', and that's certainly how he was dressed and presenting himself at this time since it permitted for greater freedom. Adding the details of what would make him a him only took a second's concentration, even on the first attempt.

The angel tried to look at it logically – something they were inventing in Greece and also China, although his Mandarin was rusty. Qui bono? Qui malo?

Who benefits? Who is harmed?

Well, of course Aziraphale would benefit from a learning experience. And the young men and women presented seemed to be agreeable to the situation, casting long looks at his clean clothing and well-kept hands.

Who would be harmed? Well, no one on either side could get pregnant or transmit disease, so that was safe enough. And surely there would be introductions first, an exchange of names and perhaps a handshake beforehand.

He'd pick it up as he went, like he normally did. Couldn't be more difficult than digestion.

Since most male-appearing people in this time seemed to pick female-looking people as romantic partners, he went with the flow. When in Locality, do as the locals do. The young woman he chose had a certain something about her, perhaps the way she coyly held her crimson veil, or the look in her brilliant hazel eyes when he smiled down at her.

She seemed so kind.

So he didn't have to pause the world when they were alone in her bed-tent at last, to gather the courage and dare to ask how they should go about it all.

She said, had he not been with a woman before?

Well, at feasts and occasionally on the street, but not in private before, he answered. Not like this.

She said, was he sure he didn't want a young man?

No, he answered, watching her eyes as she pulled aside the crimson veil and showed that her bound up hair was burnished bronze. No, I chose you, tonight. It's just that you're the first, you see. That I've...

She smiled, still kind, but now bemused.

She said, even at your age, old enough to be a father or perhaps even a grandfather?

Aziraphale felt the sting of indignation. It was true: his presented age was, in this day and age when people mated young and died young or younger, possibly of a time-frame that could indicate two generations of progeny – but he was very well-preserved and, he thought, shapely in form and approachable in bearing.

Am I not pleasing to you? he answered.

She said, we shall find out.

He told her his name. She told him her name, and he wrote it on a quiet little spot in his soul and never spoke it aloud again after they had parted.

It wasn't love. It was due reverence for his first teacher in these arts.

She let her clothing fall away; she lay back under the lamp light and indicated all the parts of her body, giving him references for a vocabulary he already possessed.

She said, touch here. Like this.

She said, lick here. Suck on this. Now bite, gently at first.

She said, wet your fingers in your mouth and put them here.

His first teacher had a lot of orders, and that was acceptable. Heaven had a lot of orders too – and Aziraphale was learning.

He learned that when she made those interesting noises they were good noises, that he had pleased her. Even when she cried out with what seemed like pain and he wanted to pull back his hand and she said stay, stay stay stay!

That moment was the best of all, she told him later.

She took off his clothes. She said, do you know the parts of your own body, Aziraphale?

Tell them to me, he answered. She laughed at his order, and did it anyway.

Then she touched them.

Something happened.

She kept touching him, kept touching the parts she'd named.

Something else happened, that was **very**  interesting.

Was that supposed to... do what it just did? he asked.

She said, you tell me; did it feel good?

After some consideration, he answered: yes, it did.

She said (sitting comfortably in her own nakedness, smiling with both her mouth and her eyes), would you like to try more?

Well, the answer was obvious!

She said, it might take a while to be ready again, perhaps even as long as a short nap.

Yes, but did they have to wait that long? he answered.

She said, not necessarily – it was up to him.

Then... Aziraphale surprised her almost as much as what she'd done had surprised him.

As the Biblical vernacular had it: he came to know his teacher, in the fashion that men knew women.

(Turns out there have always been lots of fashions.)

She at length declared herself to be quite pleased indeed, and then said that she needed to sleep but that he could stay in her bed-tent if he wanted, and he did. So she lay there and slept, and he lay there and thought.

In the morning when she woke he kissed her goodbye, as he'd learned that men-shaped people do to women-shaped people of their close acquaintanceship when they separate.

She said, when you are in the arms of the person you love, only then will you truly understand what I've showed you.

And she kissed him goodbye, with great affection and some amount of regret.

With great affection and some amount of relief, the messenger went on his way.

He'd been honored and fortunate to have a kind teacher, and from there it got much easier although the lessons varied wildly. Having known a woman it was easy to say, I have known a woman. And then to do the various things he'd learned.

That's when he learned to listen – Aziraphale discovered that the human body and the human experience was distressingly non-standard. Some female-shaped people liked things quite differently than his teacher!

So he listened to their words, to the noises they made, the way their bodies moved toward him or away as he tried things. He listened to the cries aloud that he tried to elicit; he learned to listen to the silences that might indicate... oh, anything at all, depending on the individual!

Centuries passed. The angel met with the demon sometimes, and vice versa. Aziraphale, with his new way of listening and learning, saw that Crowley was generally careful to stay an arm-length away from him. The knowledge gave him a touch of sadness, although he didn't understand why. Surely they were beyond the point of actively trying to harm each other.

Maybe demons found it more difficult to trust.

Having experienced a fair amount of variation in male/female intimacy, Aziraphale then decided (with several years of forethought) to try out being female-shaped for a while.

Didn't quite care for it, it turned out eventually.

Well, things were a certain way in the early days. In general, women had less freedom of movement and agency. And when it came to interacting with men...

Well, it was in general... mostly disappointing. Few exceptions. Some were pleasant, others were a bit horrible until Aziraphale decided minor smiting was called for in order to make a swift exit.

Until the Isle of Lesbos.

Nobody ever caught on, he thought – but the mention of that island could bring a lop-sided little smile to the angel's face, one he could never be coerced to explain.

It was there that dwelt a group of female-shaped individuals who were as comfortable with each other as his first teacher had been with her own body. It was there that Aziraphale first cried out as she had -- and knew that experience of not-quite-pain she'd felt and later called herself quite pleased.

It was intense. Almost too intense, come to think of it. And his shape never felt quite right.

No, it was a good learning experience – what it did was to teach him what he was and was not.

When he changed back into his preferred form after about a decade, he was already in the Greek islands. Turns out the Greeks had invented more than logic.

(Possibly the Chinese and everywhere else had as well, but it was a few more centuries before Aziraphale went to look.)

Now, being familiar with living within a male-shaped body, the angel experimented with other male-shaped people.

That... was very interesting, indeed!

(And Crowley, the one constancy on Earth throughout the millennia, still out of arms-length no matter where they ate or drank or sat to feed the endless ducks.)

Eventually the nineteenth century arrived; Crowley professed himself to be quite bored and took a nap, and missed the whole thing. Wouldn't even wake up long enough to return a letter or to make a social call.

Aziraphale learned to stop waiting. He had discovered the codex, and now that scrolls could be made in ever so much more a transportable form and with such glorious bindings and illustrations, he was reading a lot of them. He'd gotten good at bothering himself with humans and here, in this day and age he would find a new group of humans with which to bother.

They called themselves "bohemian." And they were, whatever that meant.

He found his discrete gentlemen's clubs, and in one of them he learned to gavotte.

He found human people that were similar to him, somehow. In one of them he found Oscar Wilde.

Wilde was compelling, distressingly so, Aziraphale thought later. His eyes blazed a challenging intelligence at the angel when they passed in the clubs, like ships in the night. Someone once muttered that he was **that**  Oscar Wilde. The poet, the playwright. The scandal.

He sounded very interesting...

Aziraphale began what he eventually came to realize was a pursuit. Trying to be in the same places as Mr. Wilde. Trying to secure copies of his works – failing and then succeeding at tracing down the original, unedited editions. Reading them in fascination. Re-reading them filled with emotions for which he had no names.

Angels didn't have emotions, after all.

Not like these ones.

Trying to get near him enough to talk, even just to introduce himself. They had several special friends in common, even. Those friends, when pressed, eagerly promised introductions and invitations – that would always strangely fade away days later.

This went on for weeks.  The angel wondered what he'd done that might have offended. He spent long dark nights in solitude and thoughtful contemplation.

Then at the next party - a Christmas party, amusingly enough - he discovered this was simply one of the very rare times in his existence that he had been so completely out-maneuvered by anyone, much less a human.

Oscar was only to be had on _Oscar's_ own terms.

He thought it was a game like any other game, the day he wound up in the same closet as Oscar Wilde. A game that men played, in discrete little clubs. It was a dance like the gavotte: touch, and turn away.

"See, the door locks here from the inside," Wilde murmured, his studied baritone such a light voice for so massive a chest. The closet was small and the tall human was bent over Aziraphale to fit into it.

Something about the tight space made it difficult to breathe. Aziraphale's heart pounded in his chest for the first time in its existence.

"Why should it do that?" the angel laughed nervously over the laughter from the other side of the door, raucous and excited sounds. "Does the clothing need occasional privacy?"

"No, but the wearers might. And besides, it keeps everyone else from ruining our fun too early."

"Are we having fun, then?"

Wilde smiled his closed-mouth smile and tilted his head. Something trembled in Aziraphale's usually sturdy mid-section. The man's eyes were so blue, such a brilliant blue, just as brilliant as his porcelain.

"We could have any fun you want," he answered. "The game is that if someone outside hears us over the clatter they themselves are making, they say that we lose."

Oscar studied the look on Aziraphale's face for a long moment in the near-darkness, then continued.

"I say that we can win the game however we like, my dear. You've read all those books that you own, Aziraphale? What say you find out?"

He knew about the shop. Mr. Wilde had not been the only one being pursued.

"Show me," he breathed. And Oscar laughed at the order, and did it anyway...

So, in the present day, we can understand that just prior to locking the door Aziraphale's thought was "We cannot be caught in this the most compromising of positions together, of course."

And immediately after locking the door Aziraphale's thought was... I know this game.

Crowley's hands were on either side of his head, blocking him in. He wasn't so tall as Oscar had been. His was a better height, for many things. It was very nearly a perfect height.

Aziraphale's right arm knew what came then and wrapped itself around Crowley's waist, keeping him close. His left arm joined it.

The demon exhaled slowly... but he didn't fight and he didn't run.

Bless Gabriel and his big fat head right outside the door, Aziraphale thought in the privacy of his own soul.

Then Crowley, as if testing something, canted his hip inward toward Aziraphale's crotch. The angel instinctively raised his chin, pushing back into the wooden wall.

See, past a certain point: if you expect to be using your car keys every day you put them in your pocket as you're getting ready to leave the house. It just becomes habit.

During most of the nineteenth century Aziraphale was utilizing his (and/or someone else's) genitals on practically a weekly if not daily basis. It'd gotten such that he never went "out" without them, even just to the shops. Not that you'd expect to experiment with your regular green-grocer (it might make later purchases moderately uncomfortable for the both of you, for one thing) but, well... you just never knew what you might get up to.

So if Crowley pressed much harder, the keys he wasn't supposed to have were absolutely gonna hurt.

He felt Crowley breathe out again, air on his face and the flexing of the demon's ribs.

Aziraphale listened with all his might and all his will.

He knew this game; his body knew this game. His keys knew this game and were waking up eager to finally play it in this millennium.

He realized two things almost simultaneously: that Crowley also had a growing erection, and that he was fucking **terrified**.

The demon's heart was hammering in his chest, not from excitement or arousal, but in fear.

The angel was a bit uncertain, here. He'd been careful always to play his games and make his experiments with willing participants; the only times there'd been someone unwilling in the process there'd also been mild smiting to get away from the too-willing people.

And this was Crowley – a demon among demons, Hell's unlikely Black Knight, not Fallen but sauntered, etc, etc. Dark sex appeal for daaaaaaaayyyyyys. Surely he'd done his own... experimenting...

Ohhhh... Somebody. Oh Somebody, no. No no no.

Aziraphale had visions of Crowley's home. The apartment nobody lived in. The bed no one slept (or did anything else, for that matter) in. The Porsche of a computer, with its manuals still shrink wrapped.

Hardly any books. No pets. Even an ansaphone on his phone line to help keep the entire world at arms-length and not a single whit closer.

Oh dear Somebody – the only living creatures Crowley'd ever properly touched were his **plants**.

His hand moved, as slowly as he'd ever practiced in thousands of years of his games, to Crowley's cheek. To caress there as if the demon were some small scared creature, to comfort. He realized that he could smell Crowley now, after centuries of getting so used to his scent it barely registered anymore. Even over the scent of fake pine chemicals.

Not evil. Not unpleasant. Just him.

The sharp line of Crowley's jaw clenched under his fingertips; a moment later he leaned his height forward and pressed his burning brow against Aziraphale's cool forehead.

Greyness around them, darkness behind the angel's eyelids burst into white and now he understood. His first teacher, then later Sappho – oh, Sappho, who'd said

 _… for whenever I look at you even briefly_  
_I can no longer say a single thing,_  
_but my tongue is frozen in silence;_  
_instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;_  
_with my eyes I see nothing..._

And Aziraphale had laughed and looked away and pretended he had never felt any such feeling. _**Never**_.

He'd trade the heights of Heaven ten times over, if he could just go back and apologize to her. He'd known the feeling all too well, and couldn't admit it – even to himself.

But now no force in Heaven, Hell, or Earth could coerce him to let go of what he finally understood. The last lesson.

Is this what it is like... to Fall?

You're mine, he said in every soft movement on his demon's cheek. You're mine, you're mine, you're mine. I didn't realize for so long, and I'm sorry for that. But you're mine now, and somehow we'll be okay.

The kiss, with six thousand years of yearning behind it, was inevitable. And perhaps ineffable.

Smooth movement that made no noise: there was not enough of the demon to hold, and not enough surety yet to seek much more. Aziraphale would have to use everything he'd ever learned; the last game paid for all. His hand gripped the slender hip and held it firmly.

Door closed across the hall from their closet. Gabriel's laugh like nails across a chalkboard; footsteps moving away.

But there had to be more, and soon – Aziraphale dared his tongue and his demon received it, as easily as if he'd expected it, experienced it a hundred million times. The depths of his mouth were unworldly hot, tasting like cinnamon and scalding coffee and the dark chocolate that makes your spine tingle.

 _… my tongue is frozen in silence.._.

Crowley ground his pelvis reflexively and Aziraphale moved to hold him, letting go a puff of exhalation that in a better world would have been born a laugh of delight.

Yes, this, oh my love, my demon, my Crowley – I'll teach you every bit of what every human taught me and you'll love it and I'll love you with it, every centimeter of you with it. I can't wait. Let the world end and we'll make love on its ashes.

More, more – he knew he should be going slower but no one ever knew how long the game would last. Someone else always eventually wanted the closet, and Aziraphale was always left wanting **something** , something additional perhaps. Even with Oscar. 

His other hand inside the jacket, sliding up the shirt, wishing he dared to untuck it, not daring, not yet. Nuzzling up along his demon's jaw and cheek, resting against his temple in an ecstasy of discovery – this is how they feel, all these little parts of you. I've gazed on them for six thousand years and never knew.

Crowley swallowed hard. Aziraphale felt his Adam's apple rise and fall, and smiled. His pulse was just barely beginning to even out, perhaps to transition to something excited and pleasured.

Then his demon bent, seized his lapel and bit it desperately. The angel was gripped in a sudden fist of Lust.

Yes oh Somebody yes... if you've never been romanced, seduced, loved – then perhaps you've never been hurt in those particular ways. Perhaps sex was never used on you as a weapon or punishment. Perhaps even Hell can be prudish. Perhaps even demons knew _you were not theirs to touch._

And sweetness could have its own spice beneath it. The Bard said it himself – "I must be cruel only to be kind..."

Aziraphale wielded that specific scourge now, moving with kisses excruciatingly slowly down the straining cords of Crowley's throat. I'm here... and I'm doing this to you. I'm here... I'm touching you. I'm here... I'm loving you.

I want to love all of you.

Aziraphale let himself shoot the moon. He slid his hand down his demon's tensed thigh, and found the part that yielded to him.

_**MINE!** _

It was a shock to Crowley's system – his whole body bucked and his fists closed in Aziraphale's hair reflexively. The angel held completely still. So did the demon, listening for noises.

But the angel held still to re-accustom his demon to the sensation, to let him incorporate what he felt and what it meant. To let him accept the tenderness he'd never had before.

Then Aziraphale exhaled slow, breath puffing across Crowley's collarbone, exposed where his kisses had pushed the shirt collar aside. He found his demon began breathing in tandem, and exhaled another sigh – that of relief. So many times these corporeal bodies had a basic programming and knew what to do, if you just let them. This matched breathing would begin to calm him down; if it continued unabated for long enough Crowley might relax entirely.

So, time to take him back up again.

Crowley's cock was weight against his palm; he squeezed it gently and listened, then increased the pressure to the flex of all his demon's other muscles speaking the silence. More, and more, measuring its length against his extended hand, stroking flesh that was feeling it for the first time.

I can give this to you. I'm so glad I can show you this.

His demon trembled and twitched; the mop-handle that had been resting against his back slid off and crashed against the wall behind Aziraphale. Thank Somebody that Gabriel had been gone minutes past; they would have lost the game.

Crowley moved with purpose a moment later, to press a kiss to Aziraphale's ear. The angel nodded – yes, I like it.

Fingers dipped and swirled – do more and I'll do more.

Crowley kissed his way to the angel's mouth as if it'd been his own idea, hips moving as guilelessly as any naive thing would, confronting pleasure for the first time.

The seconds were counting down and Aziraphale was never more aware of it than right now; what was left in the game? How much further could they go? Could he bring him off in the time allotted, in this frozen silence that threatened to choke them both?

For it was in both of them now, though no one had yet touched Aziraphale's aching cock – his focus so much so on his lover and his arousal so pitched he felt his own climax coming if he let it, if he could get them both there.

Not without you, my demon love, he vowed. Not ever again!

A sudden knock on the broom closet door, thunderously loud. Then a person outside twisted the doorknob only to find it locked.

Aziraphale laughed, he had to or else he'd cry – "heaven finds means to kill your joys with love..."

"Five more minutes," he sang viciously. Give me thirty seconds and I'll have enough, we'll both have enough...

But, no. They'd finally lost the game.

"Make it two," the outsider grumbled. "We have a technicolor yawn in the terrace, needs dealin' with."

Aziraphale withdrew his hands from the sensual heat of Crowley's body, seeking composure.

"...what?" Crowley managed a few seconds later, groggy with denied pleasure, voice barely above a murmur.

"Someone vomited at the upstairs bar. Made a beast of themselves, the poor thing."

The old voice sounded quite calm. He must be managing magnificently. He brought the light into the under-stairs closet; the darkness was too close, too dangerous.

"... how... how did you--"

"I know my favorite pubs **very**  well," Aziraphale answered, letting love linger in his tone. His view of Crowley's pale shocked face wavered through the tears he would not permit to fall.

I know all the pubs who have the special locking closets, like that old club of mine did.

"Do you know," the angel continued archly, "that all my Oscar Wilde first editions are signed?"

And would his demon know, or guess, how he'd spent that lonely nineteenth century? Mortifying his body with all types of excess, to try to forget how it felt to miss the one that slept so far from his side?

In the next moment the angel had himself back under control; the only sign that **something**  had happened in the closet was the perfect half-circle imprint of Crowley's teeth-points on his right lapel.

He'd leave them there for a while, a badge to what could not be uttered aloud, not now and maybe not ever. And when he miracled them away he'd still know they'd been there.

"Come on, my dear,"

(the "my dear" that was covered and permitted by every other "my dear" given)

and Aziraphale reached for the doorknob, flipped the lock, and pushed it open, gesturing his demon out before him. Cleaning up the spilled chemicals with a glance and a quick miracle. "Gabriel's been gone ages."

Crowley stepped out into the hall and then back. Aziraphale led him to the front door, feeling his demon close enough to reach behind and take his hand but not ever daring.

Some day we'll be done with the closet games, he thought as they emerged into the sunset glow. I should have woken you like Sleeping Beauty, with kisses, and never let you sleep another instant without you beside me.

Some day, my love, I'll teach you everything the humans ever taught me... and learn it back from you anew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * While there are definitely good straight men in the world during the decade Aziraphale is a woman, restrictions on women and concepts of appropriate behavior and male/female interactions in the various Mediterranean cultures at the time would have made them difficult for the angel to find on a consistent enough basis to be worth continuing much past his original experience of them. I'm not beating any sort of misogyny drum in this story: I just wanted to sketch in that he had experimented as a woman, not found it much to his taste for several various reasons, and had gone on looking for his bliss somewhere else.
> 
> * If we're gonna talk pining, we HAVE to mention Sappho -- and I sourced a portion of her poetry here: https://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html I hope she wouldn't mind.
> 
> * Aziraphale's story has a Goldilocks setup, with three specific encounters listed in it: too physical/clinical, too emotional/overwhelming, and one that is just right. I'm buying in on DictionaryWrites' idea that the more conflicted or complex that Aziraphale feels about something, the less he will generally speak of it. So when he finally is able to realize that he has Fallen in love with Crowley (capitalization intended, as in most media an angel falling in love is seen as a crime against God), it's interesting to see him become so loquacious about it.
> 
> * DictionaryWrites also points out that Aziraphale often doesn't seem to catch feelings (or Feelings) but when he does - it's very powerful. And he seems to have a soft spot for vulnerable things, so when he's hanging out with the smoothest, most capable demon Hell's ever had for six millennia... and then he get to see him come utterly undone... how could he *NOT* Fall?
> 
> * Turns out that when an angel makes a vow, even silently, it tends to be binding... and he knows it. Crowley had seven minutes in Hell - how long will Aziraphale have?
> 
> * I've been fortunate to know more than one gentleman who -- while being clean, kind, approachable, well-spoken, clever, and nice -- were also incredible satyrs in the realm of bedroom arts, capable of delicious depravity, wonderful cruelty, and aching tenderness. And you'd never know it just to pass them on the street. (With the utmost possible respect: I have my personal theories about Mr. Rogers. He was a _Pisces_.) When these men get their shit together, understand and accept what's in their own hearts, and learn how to express it WITH WORDS ALSO, they make the best of partners.
> 
> * I think it's funny how people laugh when Aziraphale gives orders... and then they do it anyway. Hmmmm.
> 
> * The heart went out of bohemian spaces for Aziraphale for at least a decade when Oscar Wilde died. He won't ever talk about it. But I'll tell you in confidence here that Oscar laughed as he signed all the first editions (threatening to address them to "my angel, Aziraphale"), and that the only fight they ever had was the last of the millions of times Aziraphale talked about Crowley to Oscar. That was the time that Oscar said "He sounds very interesting; I'd love to meet him," and Aziraphale turned a multitude of colors in sequence, bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, then had to go have a lie-down for a day or so. (Oscar never did that again. A year later he wrote "The Picture of Dorian Gray.")


	3. Self-Discovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Demons didn't have emotions, after all.
> 
> Not like these ones.

Surprisingly enough, the first thing Crowley wanted to do after the Bentley drove them both home was to fall into bed. He'd never done that before.

Oh, he'd slept quite a bit – even through the newly-tantalizing near-entirety of the nineteenth century. But a demon would have to have a death-wish to actually leave their body unattended on the mortal plane for even a few minutes.

The worst an undefended angel might face, if discovered by human beings, would be to get pestered for miracles. A demon could get a holy water wake-up call if they weren't careful.

The safest way he'd found to sleep was to pull both physical body and non-corporeal mind into a pocket dimension inside his own infernal soul – which was a bit like those luggages that fold up into their own containers, if those containers then vanished from this plane of existence once zipped.

He was generally careful to leave an Appearance in the human world: an illusion with only a single tenuous connection to his soul that would alert him if it were disturbed. When sleeping in his internal stronghold he left it laying flat on its back on the bed, not bothering to even lift the covers. It felt no discomfort and someone could toss holy water on it all day without Crowley receiving so much as a singe, much like how taking a hammer to a doorbell won't harm the rest of the house.

It was unfortunate that Appearances were so limited. They couldn't move or interact much, so were good only as placeholders when a lack of personality wouldn't be noticed. (Although that could explain some demons he'd met.) On the flip side, it took very little energy or effort to maintain Appearances, so they were useful while you rested or were otherwise occupied elsewhere.

The Bentley knew the way home and he let it drive with only the fingertips of one hand on the wheel, his chest a roiling cauldron of... emotions?

Demons didn't have emotions, after all.

Not like these ones.

And the first thing any demon should do, if they discovered themselves unfortunately burdened with such feelings, was to learn how to hide them perfectly. The second thing was to learn to control them utterly.

Such feelings could only be a weakness in any member of the Infernal Host – and weaknesses would be exploited by anyone who discovered them.

There were no favors in Hell, only trades of equal kind, and Crowley knew he had nothing big enough to trade to keep that knowledge secret. Even a deal would not be surety enough: what better way for someone to earn their own commendation from the Lower Powers than to accept payment from Crowley only to immediately betray him?

The Bentley parked itself in its space on the street. Crowley barely recalled climbing the stairs to his floor. Once in his flat he stood numb just inside the locked door.

Bed? Soon. First, his plants.

He picked up the water mister by the door of the atrium and moved among them robotically, watering them based on muscle memory alone. Gradually he became aware of the sussuration created by all the various house plants vibrating in desperate fear.

Crowley had thought it was fun, before. See, although he earned any number of accolades in his line of work he didn't actually inspire much fear in mortal beings. Or anyone really, unless he made an effort. Animals didn't, as a whole, much like him – but they weren't afraid of him.

At first, threatening the plants had been simply to motivate them. It was Hell's main method of encouragement, why not try it? Then he had come to realize that he did, in fact, intimidate them. And it was fun to feel a bit powerful, a bit like God or Satan, perhaps. With the power of existence or non-existence in one's hands.

It was fun, before.

"Stop it," he ordered in an even tone. If anything, this made the trembling of the greenery even worse. Had "Be not afraid" worked for anyone, ever?  
  
Crowley sighed, dropped the mister back onto its shelf, and meandered onward to the bedroom.

This room, to be perfectly honest, looked like the inside of a brand new Apple computer – all stark shades of white and gray, with trendily rounded edges. The bed was topped with a gray quilted duvet cover, and in the center of the steel headboard was set one single red decorative throw pillow that had never been touched or moved.

Crowley tried out something he'd seen humans do on TV: he stood beside the bed ram-rod straight, and fell face-first into the mattress.

Had he actually been mortal he would have cracked his skull and broken his nose, cheekbone, and most of his teeth. As it was, he lay stunned on the unyielding object for a long moment before recoiling with a snarl.

What was this thing, an eighteen centimeter thick slab of concrete? He snatched back the duvet cover.

Oh. It **actually was**  an eighteen centimeter thick slab of concrete. He remembered now; the designer had suggested a square black iron bed frame and asked his preferences regarding a mattress.

"Cement, for all I care," he'd answered. The man had been so delighted – **PEAK**  Post-Post-Industrialism!!!!! – that he hadn't heard Crowley's rejoinder of "No one's ever going to sleep on it anyway."

Well, this was remedied easily enough. In an instant the mattress sensibly remembered it should be memory foam with a feather-bed topper, and black sheets of Egyptian cotton made themselves up in place. The demon tossed the gray cover back over it all and, a bit more gingerly this time, fell into bed.

He sank to a satisfactory degree in softness that was quite sinful in nature. With a muffled moan, he rolled his shoulders and stretched out his back before swimming to the head of the bed to climb between the sheets.

Once under a comforting fortress of sheets and blankets he let his clothing disappear. The feel of Egyptian cotton at an astronomically high thread count on his body's bare flesh – well, Hell had nothing that could hold a candle to it, that's for sure.

No more avoiding it – time to turn his mind to the events of the evening. What on the entire Earth had happened with Aziraphale? Right up until the flip of the lock, the angel had been Crowley's regular angel: his gently vague, somewhat helpless, and utterly harmless persona firmly in place.

For it was a persona – only an idiot could interact with Aziraphale for a relationship spanning millennia and not spot him dropping it occasionally.

Crowley figured he knew why he did it, having the persona. Aziraphale already understood on some level (likely even consciously) that he Did Not Fit In, in Heaven.

Which, by itself, was not a Casting-Out offense... but paired with Might Be A Threat In Any Way probably would be.

Heaven wasn't terribly kind to those who were different, even if they just asked questions instead of obeying mindlessly. Crowley thought perhaps that was part of why Aziraphale loved books the way he did, because by reading them one could learn practically anything they wanted to without having to ask anyone else anything at all. Especially if one had memorized the Dewey Decimal System.

Crowley resolved to show Aziraphale the internet someday; it would really blow his mind.

(The demon could only admit in piecemeal how much time he spent thinking about his angel.)

No – it had been as if the door knob lock was a switch that had flipped him from Regular Aziraphale into an aspect of himself rarely seen. Focused. Intense. Darker, oddly enough.

He remembered the last time he'd seen that other aspect – an autumn evening in 1990.  Crowley had dropped in just before closing, to take him out to the opera.

He'd picked up a copy of Hunchback of Notre Dame to thumb through idly as he waited, attempting to project Average Customer vibes as strongly as he could. His first hint that something was amiss came when he heard his angel speak to the two men entering the shop.

"We're preparing to close," Aziraphale had said. Crowley glanced up, startled because his tone lacked the lilting sing-song he would have given the regulars and tourists.

"We're not here to buy," answered one of the suits, politely enough to start. "Or rather, we're not here to buy books."

The demon saw the subtle shift in Aziraphale's posture, the tiniest clench of his jaw as he shook the man's hand, who went on to explain earnestly that their firm had just purchased the two buildings next door to the bookstore.

Meanwhile the second man who had not yet spoken was doing his best to sidle down a side aisle of shelves and Crowley (who had mastered both sidling and lurking in his early days as a demon, and knew a rank amateur on sight) gently shut the hardback tome he was holding.

The tiny noise sounded like a thunderclap in the empty shop where the one man was whispering urgently to his angel and the other was perambulating intentionally to a spot out of view.

Aziraphale turned his head just far enough to catch Crowley with a quick glance out of the corner of his eye. The demon was transfixed. The darted look said as clearly as if aloud: "Do it."

Crowley did **not**  laugh at the order. He set down the book and began a proper sidle of his own, following the second well-dressed tough.

Who was, he discovered, all the way in the little reading nook at the end of the shelves. The man took something out of his mouth and slid it into a small bundle he held in his other hand.

"No smoking on premises," said Crowley airily, sauntering up to him past stacks of books and crowded little tables.

The stranger folded his hand gingerly around what he held; must be hot. "What are you, the staff?"

"Nah, 'm a freelance. But even I know the rules. So _**LEAVE**_."

This last was snarled through a mouth suddenly containing way too many teeth. Crowley had pulled his sunglasses down and, as if removing a mask, revealed to the suited man a face out of nightmares.

He'd dropped what he'd held in terror; Crowley helpfully stepped to one side to create a space and the man bolted through it, headed for the front door.

The demon picked up the cunning little packet and examined it thoughtfully: it was a bundle of three matches wrapped in a piece of notebook paper and tied lightly with a string. The man had lit a cigarette and pulled it until the tip was a bright cherry coal blazing too hot to properly smoke, then slid it filter-end first into the bundle.

Ah, an incendiary device. If he'd placed it without someone realizing, it would have burned unnoticed for several minutes before roaring up to destroy all the literature around it like so much dry tinder. Crowley thought of a few choice blessings as he meandered back to the central area of the shop.

Here the first suited man was still murmuring, even though his hands kept folding themselves in a helpless, restless motion, ceaselessly. He didn't seem to be able to look away from Aziraphale's calm gaze.

Crowley curled the little packet into his palm, not feeling the heat. He brought himself to a stop a meter behind the angel's right shoulder and stared at the man.

"...really if you ever think of selling please think of us we'll be developing the other two lots shortly so you'll see our number on the sign just give us a call and please ask for Justin that's me," he said, not pausing for breath. Starting to get red around the collar from the effort, and he still couldn't look away.

"I sure will," interrupted Aziraphale, and Crowley would have given just about anything to be able to see the look on his face. Then again, the way "Justin" was hypnotized, maybe it wasn't a good idea.

"You should go now," the angel added. The spell was broken; the suited man turned and fled the shop.

Spine straight, Aziraphale held out his hand. Crowley set the still smoldering packet into it. Slowly Aziraphale's head moved to regard it. His fist clenched and flames burst from between his fingers, devouring the device.

"What a nasty little trick," Aziraphale said in that same strange calm little voice. The fire burned itself out after a moment and he turned around, and Crowley flinched. "Now it will never hurt anyone ever again," the angel said, looking up into Crowley's face. His eyes were the darkest shade of storm-cloud blue that the demon had ever seen them.

Then the storm broke and faded away. Aziraphale smiled and he was halfway back to his usual self. "Sorry for the spot of bother; shall we be going?"

Crowley wasn't quite himself at all during the opera; he barely remembered it whatsoever. He remembered spending the next two days trying and not quite failing to sleep in his frozen wasteland of an interior stronghold, wracked with some confusion about what churned inside him.

The order, unmistakable: "Do it." And he'd done it. And if Hell knew, he'd be far worse than damned. How had it felt – to know instantly what the angel was thinking, to move as smoothly as a cat's unsheathing claw to work his will in his stead?

(to return to his right fist like a hunting falcon to the gauntlet, the deepest parts of his heart murmured)

Crowley had shuddered and burned, alone in perpetual twilight.

And this was same as that, over two decades ago. The switch had flipped and then – trapped there in the silence together – Crowley felt himself drawn into Aziraphale's will again, held mesmerized by the serene and self-composed power in his touch.

Crowley here and now in his burrow of sheets became aware that he could still smell his angel. His hands were practically soaked in the ethereal musk from his hair, and his face and throat were bathed in that specific perfume the demon would know anywhere, even layered under thousands of other lesser scents.

His touch, his breath, his kiss, leaving indelible marks on Crowley's flesh. He brought his hands to his face and created a cave of them, inhaling deeply.

Somebody!

A tremor wracked his frame.

Lust. Yeah, let's talk about lust. Not long after the near-burning of the book shop, Crowley had gone looking for porn. Every couple of years after that he tried it. Porn was easy to find... and none of it thrilled him. None of it did **anything**  for him. All it seemed to be was random humans doing things of various disgustingness to each other.

For that matter, Crowley felt more moved by the wild nature shows that filmed animals mating – at least the passion there was real, if caused more by instinct and pheromones than emotional connection.

(stags rutting, lions mounting each other, serpents entwined – four hours of Animal Planet later and Crowley had had to take a cold shower in an irrational stupor, wanting **something**  and not knowing what or how to get it)

He opened his hands, spreading them down his cheeks and throat, out across his shoulders.

Never mind other demons. Hell had Lust, of course – and it was always on a job among the living. The damned were already damned; it'd be a waste to try to tempt them further. So if any demon had personal sexual knowledge of any other creature, Crowley wasn't aware of it and probably neither was the rest of Hell.

But he'd gotten some ideas, over the eons. Somehow.

He passed one hand down his body, fitting it to the place on the opposite hip where Aziraphale had gripped so tightly.

Ahhh... his angel. Crowley tested the feeling of the apartment, so attuned to him that he'd know if there was even a single ant or spider invading it (much less any larger being) before daring to think: his beloved.

He'd wanted to spread him out on crimson sheets, creamy white against the brilliant red. Naked, stripped of every single shred of haberdashery in which he armored himself. That incredible scent wafting recklessly all around Crowley, like incense in a pagan shrine.

Crowley had wanted to explore him, every centimeter of him... glancing up at that gentle smile over and over as he became acquainted with the wrinkles on the tips of his knees, and the texture of the skin at the back of his heels, and every crescent moon curve of his finger and toenails.

Staying safe for a while in the parts he'd seen before, in passing, before he moved further in to terra incognita. The insides of his elbows, the hollow of his armpits. The flatness of his chest, and little bumps of nipples. The soft curve of his abdomen.

And here, further down, where he is like me in our treason – Crowley's hand moved and found himself half-hard. Remembering Aziraphale's erection against his thigh brought another surge of sensation. He pulsed against his own palm and groaned.

The heat under the sheets, the softness of the linen caressing him, the confusion weltering in his mid-section and the curious tension in his groin; in a moment it was too much and he poked his head out from under the blankets into the relative cool air of the room.

His skin felt like a fitted garment half a size too small. He gnashed his teeth, wanting something to bite.

Like a burning sigil in his brain he saw the half-circle imprint of his teeth on the right lapel of Aziraphale's suit jacket. It drew him in; he centered it in his thoughts.

Crowley stroked his fingers from the base to the tip of his prick and gripped it briefly. He could feel his heartbeat in it – the organ that was normally optional now working overtime to pump blood to this specific extremity, also optional.

What did it feel like, for Aziraphale?

What did it feel like... with Aziraphale?

_Crowley?_

His angel's voice echoed in his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The incendiary device is based on this wacked out guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Leonard_Orr
> 
> (I watch way too much true crime.)
> 
> Crowley's personal song in my head is Shameless, by Billy Joel. Go read the lyrics and feel your third eye open.
> 
> These beautiful dumb pining bastards get 2 more chapters to get their shit together before they kill me. Hope you enjoy my swift and untimely demise! :)


	4. Making A Connection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I guess I must be the angel in your head, as you're surely the demon in mine.”
> 
> It was true, for a given value of true. As a significant bonus it appeared to answer the question at the same time that it completely failed to do so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think we've finally, uh, edged into Explicit territory.

Aziraphale had walked home to the bookshop from the pub just two streets down, feeling about as distracted and discombobulated as Crowley had looked climbing into the welcoming-open door of the Bentley.

There was something nagging at his thoughts, something he was sure was quite important – but all else seemed to be subsumed in the old familiar urge. Having been so hotly roused his body wanted its release and, lacking a suitable partner ( **his**  partner, a tiny little voice in his heart corrected) he'd have to see to it himself.

Not that this was an issue; his body was used to orgasming at least once every few weeks in even the driest of dry-spells, and he had memories of experiences spanning back five thousand years for reference to arouse himself with.

Perhaps he'd even relive the very first time with his first teacher, with her reddish hair and golden eyes.

And as soon as some physical equilibrium was restored, the nagging thought would make itself coherent and could be dealt with then.

He put a bit of extra pep in his stride and made it back to the bookshop without making any scene of himself.

In the farthest and smallest back room of the shop was what Aziraphale considered his private quarters. His "living space" was the shop and the entire rest of the world if he was honest, but this small room was where his bed, clothing, and most prized and personal possessions were. The door remained locked at all times, whether he was behind it or not.

Come to think of it – no one else had ever seen this room, not even Crowley. It wasn't a place to entertain anything but the most intimate of company (there was nowhere to sit but the bed, for example) and Aziraphale's games and experiments among mortals took place wherever propriety and convenience permitted, but always elsewhere.

Oh thank Somebody, the angel thought, shutting the door and bolting it behind him now. The arousal he'd held at bay for the last several minutes was threatening to choke him. He didn't wait any longer – he undid his trousers to free his erection...

… which didn't exist.

Despite a welter of Lust throughout the rest of his body that he felt as if might burst him apart at an atomic level, his member was as limp as a cooked linguine noodle.

"Noooo..." he moaned softly.

Maybe it was just a – a temporary difficulty. Maybe if he got more comfortable...

Aziraphale stripped out of his clothing, not rushing the process, folding and putting away or hanging up each garment that came off his body as clean as the day it was first stitched.

He climbed up into his bed – a loft high above a shelving unit with multiple deep drawers, reachable via ladder – and let himself fall into its feather-down softness.

(At about this time, Crowley stunned himself on a concrete slab of mattress.)

In a nest of linen sheets and puffy quilted duvets, Aziraphale shifted onto his back and called up the memory of the second-hottest encounter he'd ever had.

Not the hottest; not anything involving Oscar Wilde. For an immortal being the loss was still too fresh, the grief too raw to be dealt with lightly. And, strange to say it, there was always a layer of guilt for him in the time he spent with Oscar. Aziraphale had often wondered if he was "cheating" on God, perhaps, with the level and nature of still-perplexing emotions he felt for the playwright.

Now he wondered if it might have cheating on someone else...

Nonetheless, the second-hottest was plenty hot enough and had worked wonders in the past when used for this same purpose. He let his hands roam his torso as his mind unspooled the encounter before his sightless eyes.

As the memory began to reach its first of several crescendos, the angel's fingertips sought his cock.

No. Still flaccid.

 **Fine** , he thought, his usually phlegmatic temper flaring viciously. We go for the big guns.

Crowley.

Somebody, yes... Heaven's foremost prodigal and Hell's finest temptation, as far as Aziraphale was concerned. He imagined a glimpse of those slitted topaz eyes over the top of his demon's sunglasses and a shudder of Lust and longing went through him.

How many times had Aziraphale not dared to dream this dream? Angels had so little privacy – it was said that several of the archangels as well as God could read all your thoughts so it was better just not to have any thought that might be...

Lascivious?

Seditious?

Treasonous?

Better not to hear one's own heart, if it urges apostasy via the love of another person that might in that specific heart put them on the same level as a distant, ineffable God – or, Heaven forbid, even higher?

But oh, he heard it tonight as darkness fell over the bookshop and rose behind his eyelids, as he remembered and savored the moments where he'd briefly held his beloved demon in his arms... touched him, caressed him, kissed him, teased his most intimate parts through the barrier of his clothing.

Aziraphale felt Lust like a forest fire racing across his skin, tempered now within the forge of Love into something purer and more powerful. Strong enough to ease some of the languor of his cock – it swelled slightly in his hand.

Crowley.

Inexperienced (and deliciously so) but glorious in his surrender to the angel's will, there in that dark little closet. Not for him were the games and experiments of the last fifty centuries – he was the focus of every single act that had gone on before, the dark heart at the center of the brilliant spiral of the galaxy, the most secret treasure of Aziraphale's eternal soul.

He groaned and writhed in the sheets, giving his prick a slow stroke with a squeeze at the end of it, trying to rouse it all the way. He became conscious of the fact that he could smell his demon's scent on his hands, and the thought that that perfume was mingling with the musk of his most private parts gave him another thrill.

Oh Somebody yesssss... his beloved demon, his greatest crime, his deepest passion, his reason for falling – even Falling all the way, if it came to that. Yes.

_**Yes.** _

Slowly he went, trying to rouse his body all the way and still the flesh fought him. He even banished his genitals and re-summoned them, just to be sure they didn't need some sort of "reboot".

Aziraphale knew from hard-earned experience that if he kept trying this way he'd eventually wind up with chafing, and that was the last thing he needed right now.

Crowley, he thought again. Just to have you here with me, have you near again. Just to touch you...

He cast his glance around the room, looking for something that could possibly aid him, anything to break this awful tension and help him reach full arousal and eventually the climax his body craved.

His gaze came to rest on his wool jacket, hung on its hook by the wall. The lapels were turned back on either side and there he could see the half-circle impression of Crowley's fangs. He blinked: they seemed to glow red the more he focused on them.

_Aziraphale?_

The beloved voice, strangely lost and vulnerable-sounding, reverberated in his head.

 _Aziraphale?_  it said again.

"Crowley?" he answered.

_Is that... is that really you?_

Let's slow down the moment so we can understand what happened next.

First off, fairly intelligent humans think fairly quickly. The fastest ones can give the average angel a run for their money, so to speak.

A fairly intelligent angel is blindingly fast by comparison however, so the following three thoughts occurred in a minuscule fraction of a second for Aziraphale:

One: that there was such a thing as "sympathetic magic" in that, if you had a portion of someone else's body or a fluid that had originated in their body, you could work spells regarding them. Hair, teeth, fingernail parings, tears, blood, semen, saliva...

And Crowley's teeth-marks and traces of his saliva were on Aziraphale's jacket – a jacket he had worn carefully for over one hundred and seventy years by this time and had also by that long familiarity taken on some of his energy for the sake of magical purpose. There was something of both of them in it now, and the gestalt between the two had apparently opened a spiritual gateway by which they could communicate after a fashion.

Two: as the fact that his dick was suddenly rock hard in his fist indicated, his final thoughts in the dark of the closet (before the knock from the outside that had disrupted them both) had been in the vein of a vow – subconsciously intended if consciously rejected. "Not without you, my demon love – not ever again!"

That was what the nagging thought had been trying to tell him through a musky haze of desire: vows made by angels were not lightly thought or spoken, nor were they lightly rescinded. His ability to achieve erection and orgasm appeared to from that moment on be bound up in Crowley's arousal and climax, for now and possibly forever.

Exploring the ramifications of this would have to wait; there were more pressing matters at hand, so to speak.

And three: some of the best advice he'd ever received was from Plato, and it resurfaced in his mind now. Plato had been escorting him to an orgy – his first one, as a matter of fact – and Aziraphale had asked him what to generally expect of the event.

"Well, there's no real way to tell what to expect," the scholar had said, his broad shoulders and magnificent height making the angel feel compact and slender beside him. (Then again, he was wearing his body a few decades younger that century, as was the style.) "One thing I will say though, is be cool."

"Be cool?" Aziraphale echoed.

"Yeah, be cool. Trust me: once we're there and things really get started, you're gonna see some shit. You're gonna see shit you've never dreamed of in your entire life. You're probably gonna see some very sexy shit – and you might see some less sexy shit as well. You just never know.

"But if you keep cool during all of it, just giving the impression that you're interested and it's all pleasantly nice but nothing terribly shocking, you'll get to see even **more**  shit. And maybe get invited to participate, even! I've seen people mess things up for themselves in the local scene permanently simply because they flipped out and seemed disgusted or distressed by what they saw – or they got too desperate to be involved when they weren't yet invited, and it turned everyone else off.

"Be cool and you'll wind up with your pick of whatever's available that you find to your taste." And he grinned down at the angel, and bumped his shoulder gently with one powerful elbow.

Aziraphale had found that instruction priceless over the centuries: maintaining a gently amused and courteously intrigued yet slightly reserved persona in the circles in which he conducted his experiments led to entry into games and events that he never would have imagined to request on his own.

(A year after this conversation and subsequent orgy, Plato wrote his Symposium. Two hundred years after Plato's death the realization hit: "He was hitting on me. Oh dear. Oh no. He was **completely**  hitting on me," and Aziraphale found a quiet wall and knocked his forehead against it repeatedly for at least ten minutes.)

Back in the current moment and without any noticeable pause, Aziraphale stayed as cool as possible as he answered "I guess I must be the angel in your head, as you're surely the demon in mine."

It was true, for a given value of true. As a significant bonus it appeared to answer the question at the same time that it completely failed to do so.

 _Yes, of course,_  Crowley answered, assuming whatever permitted him the most comfort. Aziraphale noted that the "signal" faded out whenever he shifted his gaze from the teeth imprints in the lapel, so he rolled onto his left side to focus on it and on the voice he was hearing in the silence.

 _You seemed to know more... about this sort of thing,_  the demon went on.

"I've had a few experiences." Again, true for a given value of true.

 _I don't understand it, myself. Humans are so weird._  The distant voice sighed softly. _And they're so fragile and they die so quickly and easily. Why get invested in the whole mess, only to lose them so soon?_

Why indeed, thought Aziraphale, with a pang at the memory of Oscar.

"Well, there are no humans around right now," he hazarded aloud. "So what are you needing to know?"

_Everything._

"Everything?"

 _Well..._  And here Aziraphale experienced a double-layer of vision: his regular personal space with its small and long-memorized dimensions, superimposed with an image of Crowley's apartment in what must be his bedroom. There was a grey duvet-cover in view and, from the angel's point of view, a long and slender hand came up out of it and pushed it away.

The other hand was wrapped around the most beautiful cock Aziraphale had ever seen.

"Ohhhh..." he exhaled, eyes fixed on the bite-mark and his mind's gaze on that other sight. "Ohhhh, Crowley... you're gorgeous."

 _Am I?_  Again that small vulnerability in the demon's voice; Aziraphale gave himself to the maelstrom of desire that arose within.

"You are... so much so. Take your left hand and run it down your chest. Watch it as you move – I want to see what you do to yourself."

_Why?_

Aziraphale laughed, filled with affection. He'd played this game too, both with jaded ingenues and with true innocents who wanted to lose an increment or two of their naivety to his blandishments.

"Because it's wonderfully sexy, Crowley. Because it turns me on to see you touch yourself."

The vision of the slender hand meandered down the slender chest; the demon gasped and shifted his hips. _So you... you have this too?_

"You felt it on your thigh in the closet tonight; I know you did. And yes... I've got it right now."

_Because of me?_

"Because of you. Play with your nipples a moment; see if you like how they feel."

Crowley did as bidden by what he assumed was a wayward corner of his own imagination; Aziraphale felt the little sparks as each sensitive peak of flesh was lightly pinched and tugged, then rubbed with the pad of the demon's thumb.

The angel felt the shuddering gasp in Crowley's chest.

"Look down... mmmm, see that gorgeous cock."

_Is it?_

"It is, you beautiful thing. Beautiful to match all the rest of you, my darling. Stroke it for me. I want to watch."

_You..._

"I like to watch you," and his breathing was heavier now; he struggled to keep it even and his voice steady. "I like to watch you walk with that sexy saunter of yours, like you've got a pendulum in your pants and your sweet ass keeps time with it, and now I know what that pendulum looks like. So wrap your fist around it and stroke it, because I can't."

 _Not yet,_  Crowley whispered. His hand stayed still around an erection that hadn't flagged in the slightest. _But some day._

"Oh my dear demon... yes, some day!"

Crowley unwrapped his hand and brought it toward his own face; Aziraphale watched it come as if it was his own. Then the demon licked his palm thoroughly with what proved to be a moderately forked tongue, and sent it back down slick and wet.

On the first stroke they groaned as one.

 _What else do you like?_  breathed the demon.

Aziraphale gripped the side of the mattress, curling his pillow tightly under his head. There was no need and even no will for him to touch himself now – his beloved Crowley would take them both there, if he was lucky.

But he'd been playing these games for far too long to surrender now.

"For every stroke you make, I'll tell you a thing I like."

He felt Crowley's smile. The phantom hand in Crowley's bedroom made another long, slow transit of the demon's erection.

"I like your smile. That sexy little smirk." That was an easy one.

Crowley fisted his cock again and groaned.

"I like the sound of your voice."

Again; the demon reached down in a moment of innovation and played with his balls also.

"Mmmmm... I like your imagination."

 _You are my imagination,_ Crowley answered wryly, but his breath was coming faster.

"I like your beautiful sharp cheekbones."

Crowley's hand was moving faster; he thrust his hips upward with each stroke of his fist.

"Oh... my love... yes... I love your eyes."

_My eyes?_

Aziraphale's throat was dry. "Like brilliant twin stars in the darkest night. Like two yellow sapphires in the bottom of a well, reflecting the glimmering moonlight above."

_You called me your love, just now._

His voice was choked on emotion; his hands did not stop doing the things he found pleased him best.

"Yes?" Aziraphale gasped. He was so close...

_Do you?_

"What?"

_Do you love me, Aziraphale?!_

The angel felt the tears rise, despite the feverish pitch of his arousal. He pressed his damp face into his pillow; the feather down warmed with the heat of his smile.

"Oh, Crowley.... I love you... I love you so... I've no idea exactly when it started but I've loved you for so long that you're a part of me now."

_Yes?!_

They were both so close.

"Yes!" Aziraphale whispered, chest aching with the intensity of the feeling as he gave himself to the Fall. "You and always and only you, my love. Now and forever more!"

The shared orgasm hit him like a freight train – the angel rocked back with the intensity of it, ejaculating in the clean sheets and not caring, blind and deaf to everything except the gentle sobs of release echoing in his mind and the feel of the demon trembling and clenching around his own experience.

Somebody... how he wished he could enfold him in his arms, comfort and caress him as he rode the last measures of his first bliss, kiss his fluttering eyelids and the pulse in his throat.

"I'm here, my love; I'm here," he murmured softly instead. The demon let go of his cock and crossed his forearms over his eyes to block out the world; two thin streams of tears tracked down his cheeks.

"I'm here with you, my love, my only one..."

 _No, you're not,_  protested the demon through the grief and longing he never would have shared face to face. _No, you're not – and that's the problem. You're only in my head. You're only ever in my dreams._

Aziraphale knew when to stop talking. And, although he stayed focused totally on the bite-mark for another few minutes, the connection faded away.

Coming back to himself, the angel took stock of the situation. He cleaned the sheets with a thought, then climbed carefully back down out of bed. His body moved with the gentle fatigue of total satiation, but his heart was roiling with emotion.

Oscar – my dear Oscar – you were my only teacher for this. I never would have been prepared and could never have understood in the slightest, had you not caused some of this feeling in me before.

Aziraphale had the habit of allowing his body to sleep for two or three hours every couple of days. Although he didn't technically require sleep and didn't much like it (as it took time away from reading more books) he kept the practice of it for two reasons: that he felt as if his body was improved and maintained by the occasional light refreshment of a nap, and because if he didn't sleep every so often he would have no consistent reason to be able to wear his pajamas.

And his pajamas were _adorable_.

He dressed himself in them now, in fingertips that trembled slightly. Sleep, yes – for even a decadent and usually unnecessary four hours! A rest of the soul and body would help things make more sense, and help him to develop a plan for how things must proceed until the Apocalypse.

So Aziraphale hoped. Yet he woke in the early hours of the next morning with no better concept of what to do with this twisted situation, and nobody he could ask for help – not even his demon himself.

Now, conscious of himself as being in some sort of ethereal chastity belt, he went through his days with his very clothing seeming to burn around him. Aziraphale's nights were spent naked, trying to coax some means of pleasure from his own body, utilizing each of his finest memories and every trick he'd learned, looking for release. Until it actually did chafe, even.

The thought – once, and very briefly – crossed his mind to seek out some sort of human companion in the interim, to see if the touch of someone else's hands and body might bring him to the place...

No, he rejected immediately, his skin crawling with something close to revulsion. Good or bad, ill or sound, Heaven or Hell or this place in between them: he knew what he wanted now.

Crowley, and only Crowley.

And then, weeks later, the demon himself called him up for a meeting in the park. The usual thing – the Antichrist, the coming end of the world, the scheduled war between the angelic and infernal hosts. Nothing special.

Be cool, Aziraphale reminded himself. Just be cool.

And he was, as habits of millennia kicked in and he pretended everything was the same as it ever was.

God was watching, after all.

Crowley offered him a ride back to the bookshop; Aziraphale accepted. He sat in the Bentley's passenger seat and took long slow breaths that filled his lungs with the scent of his demon.

When they pulled to the curb he stepped up and out, smiled his thanks back to Crowley in the driver's seat, and let himself back into the shop as if his flesh wasn't burning with a helpless desire. He double-checked that the CLOSED sign was in the shop window and all the blinds were pulled, then went to his private quarters and paced their short meters. Every second turn had him gazing at the bite-impressions in the wool jacket he couldn't bring himself to wear yet.

Everyone would know, if they saw the marks. And he couldn't bear to miracle them away just yet.

 _Angel?_  said a familiar voice, ringing through his mind.

He stumbled over his feet, he'd stopped so abruptly. "Crowley?"

_I pulled over by a park. I couldn't take it._

"What was it?"

_I can smell you, all through the Bentley. I... I just..._

The angel focused on the impressions of his demon's teeth in the jacket and then he was there, looking down with Crowley onto Crowley's own body – his shirt was undone another button or two, his trendy scarf untied and the ends brushed to either side of his body, and his jeans unbuttoned and unzipped. His absolutely delicious erection strained through the opening.

 _It was all I could do to sit there beside you,_  the demon continued, _and pretend that I don't imagine you like this. That thinking about you, being near you, smelling you... doesn't do this to me._

Aziraphale sat down on the wooden floor in his bedroom, his back to the drawers under his loft bed. The drawer pulls poked his lower back and the spot between his shoulders but he didn't care – all that mattered was to shove his own trousers down and aside and get at the evidence of his own arousal now firmly making itself felt.

_Sometimes... sometimes I wish I could bite you. But I would hurt you if I did._

The angel stroked his cock and felt his heart race with the pleasure. "You never would hurt me, my love – not unless I wanted you to."

 _You wanted me to?_  the demon repeated, amazed. His fingertips circled just the tip of his erection slowly.

Be cool, Aziraphale reminded himself. Take it slower than that – there are some ideas that must be built up to gently.

_Where was your jacket today? The one that I bit?_

Ooooh... uhhhhhhh...

"Well it was rather warm; I didn't feel the need to wear it."

_Huh. I haven't seen you much without it in the last century or so..._

"Crowley... were you wanting to talk about my outerwear, or were you wanting to orgasm?"

His demon chuckled quietly; Aziraphale thought he might melt into a little puddle on the floor.

"I want to feel you come."

_I think I want to, too. I hadn't ever, before. Not before that thing a few weeks ago. Right after we were stuck in the closet together._

Aziraphale unfastened his shirt, the better to get at his own body. "Why is it you had a cock then, darling?"

 _I could ask the same of you..._  The demon's fingers still circled lazily, unhurried. What had he been experimenting with in the meanwhile? _But I suppose I wouldn't get a real answer, would I. Mmmm. It's always just... felt right. To have that, when I'm around you. I never did anything with it but I still wanted it there. Innit weird?_

"I don't think so," he breathed. Swimming in the ocean of their shared arousal, suddenly he had the patience of a saint.

 _What is it you want?_  his demon asked, reaching down into his tight jeans to fondle and tug at his scrotum.

"Right now or in general?"

Crowley gave another little laugh that became a hummed moan. _Mmmmm, both, I think..._

Aziraphale leaned his head back against the drawers and pinched his nipples in the way he enjoyed, rolling them between thumb and forefinger. If he went to touch his genitals now, before Crowley was closer to his own pleasure, all he'd get would be frustrated agony.

"Well, you've seen pornography, haven't you? Pictures and video and the like?"

 _Ugh. None of it did much for me._  But he didn't stop caressing himself.

Aziraphale's voice was firm, and filled with tenderness. "I understand that. But I'd say all of it is very different when you are with someone you truly care for. Like when we were in the closet together. Anyone else trying to touch you like that would have turned out very differently, don't you think?"

 _Yes._  He considered it for a long moment; the angel sensed the rapid cognition of a variety of violent results before Crowley resumed the thought. _You're different, to me._

"And so are you, to me. What I want right now is for you to come, right here in your car, practically in public but no one else to catch you at your pleasure."

 _Simple enough..._  He spread his clothing open wider to give himself more access.

"What I want in general... is to do the things you've seen in porn, and find out the ones you really do enjoy when they're done with the right person."

Crowley exhaled hard through slightly-parted lips. _And if I don't like something?_

"Then you tell me so, and we stop. But if you're willing to at least try them, you might find all sorts of things you didn't know that would feel good."

_So tell me some of them._

"You've done some exploring, with the body that you have..." When Crowley made no sign of disagreement, he continued, caressing down his own abdomen and out across his thighs. "Do you know that there's a spot just a finger-length or so inside your own asshole, that can make you orgasm more intensely?"

Now Crowley truly laughed aloud – a hard, embarrassed belly-laugh. _You must be kidding._

"I would never kid about something like that. There's a lot of sensitive nerve endings in the area also. That's why many male humans enjoy things being done with their ass."

 _Huh._  His hands started playing with his erection again – that hadn't flagged the slightest for all of his embarrassment. A good sign.

"I wish I could be there. I wish you could be sitting on my lap instead of that seat."

_We'd have to get in the back; there's not that much room in the front._

Aziraphale grinned, pulling his trousers down to his calves. He hadn't even taken off his shoes yet.

"That's fine; however we need to do to make it fit. See: with you on my lap, my cock could be inside your ass."

 _Longer than your finger?_  Crowley asked archly. The angel wanted to die in the sudden rush of Lust he felt, and be reborn as a nebula or something else large enough to contain the incredible emotion.

"Longer," he choked, and swallowed hard to clear his throat. "And thicker. And the intimacy of having this part of me be enclosed in that part of you... would be wonderful."

 _Ahhhh..._  Part groan and part sigh, Crowley's hands squeezed his own prick; the head swelled and turned briefly purplish.

"Yes... and I'd move my hips gently, and run the tip of my cock over that spot inside you. And you could lean back and rest against my chest, feel my arms around you, feel my hands doing to you what you're doing right now."

Crowley arched his back so that his head could rest on the top of the leather seat-back, imagining it to be his angel's shoulder. _That would... feel so good.._.

Aziraphale wet his lips. "We'd go so slow, my love. We'd have all eternity, if we wanted. You safe in my arms, being pleasured. Me, finally able to hold you as I wished, and move to bring you and me both orgasms..."

The angel could feel the tremor that set up in the demon's thighs.

"You're mine," he growled, filled with aching need. "Every inch of you, from the tallest hair on your head to the very soles of your feet, every single atom and part and I'd mark you with kisses and love-bites and suck-marks. And I'd wait..." (oh how he waited) "for you to be ready, for you to be close and eager, and my hands and my dick would bring you the rest of the way to your climax, and give you mine in return..."

Crowley's hands were working their own magic; Aziraphale felt it as if they lived in one body entirely. He felt the tingling begin in that spot inside and work its way outward through every limb. Panting on the floor he could hear his demon's ragged breathing hitch, and stop; hitch, and stop.

"Come for me, love!"

The first jagged little cry tore at Aziraphale's heart; he felt his own cock twitching and the warm honey of orgasm spreading in his nerves but all his attention was focused on the demon's gasping moans and the way his hands did not pause but slicked the hot spasms of fluid around his cock's head and over its ridge as lubricant to milk every single drop of pleasure out of the experience.

"My greedy little demon," Aziraphale sighed mock-scoldingly, barely mindful of the ejaculate on his bare thighs or the thin tracks of tears running down his cheeks. "We can do this again, whenever you want – all you have to do is think of me and I'll be with you. We'll have all the time in the world."  
  
_Aziraphale,_  he breathed.

Both of them remembered the Apocalypse was coming, in rather less than five years now. Neither of them spoke about it.

"Lick your hand," he ordered instead. "I want to taste your pleasure."

Crowley obeyed, as pliant as a lamb in his afterglow. His forked tongue twined around and between his spread fingers.

"That is so good..."

 _Aziraphale!_  The bond was gently fading.

"I'm with you always, my love. Always. Call on me this way, whenever you want to share your pleasure." He laughed through his tears. "Or call me on the phone, when you simply want to do lunch."

Then the connection was gone and Aziraphale was alone in his own head again.

A disheveled mess, sprawled on the floor covered in come like some sordid random encounter, still weeping with the intensity of the feeling that sexual contact suddenly had for him – Aziraphale got a glimpse of the future, as Nice and Accurate as Agnes Nutter could possibly have wished.

It involved two things.

The first was that immediately when shops and general businesses opened tomorrow morning, Aziraphale was going to find the finest bespoke tailor in the city. He was going to go there with his demon-bitten jacket on a hanger and say to them: do not touch this garment, but duplicate it in every single precise detail down to the number and places of the hand-stitches themselves  **except**  for the teeth-marks on it.

Price would be no object. He would tell them of the fabric and the lining and the pockets; if they had to do a special dye job to match he didn't care how much it would cost. They could step close and take a thousand pictures as he held the jacket open for them. They could make a 3D scan and laser measurements and color processing and any other futuristic thing that they did these days. He would even let them measure his own person for the fit but they would **not**  lay even so much as a fingertip on the talisman that connected himself and Crowley in such an intimate manner.

And he would go on to wear the duplicate garment while the original, the magical object, would hang in the loft where Aziraphale slept – kept close, where its magic could continue to work.

And it would – the second thing was that Aziraphale was sure that every few weeks (and quite probably more often) he would hear the voice of his demon in his mind, either of them having thought of or focused on teeth-prints in soft cream-colored wool. And he would feel his arousal and rise to meet it, hurrying to find privacy here in his personal quarters, or in an alley, or in a restroom, or a closet, or even sitting primly with his eyes closed on a park bench and never hinting by sound or movement or expression to the outside world that he was orgasming harder than he ever did in any experiment or game at a discreet gentlemen's club.

In this way, meeting in public, meeting in the private of their minds, Crowley and Aziraphale could survive the years.

And so they did – right up until the day the world ended...

Once it restarted... well, the old rules didn't exactly apply then, did they?

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plato was (possibly) a wrestler and Aziraphale played an eromenos for a few decades, pass it on.
> 
> Aziraphale's personal song in my head is "Bent", by Matchbox 20 -- although the Muse made a slightly-more-than-semi-serious push for it to be "Cuz I Love You" by Lizzo. Either works, although the second is more crackalicious. Go read the lyrics and your chakras will align.
> 
> The boys begged for and will get a 6th chapter. It was only a crack-fic... how the hell did it end up like this?
> 
> (Because I add FEELINGS to every goddamn thing, that's why.)


	5. Maintaining Appearances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I've seen you tempt and I've seen you disrupt and I've seen you do your minor mischiefs -- but I have never seen you be willfully cruel to any living creature. Do you really wish to rule them by terror and threats of torture and destruction, as Heaven and Hell have tried to rule you and I, my love?”
> 
> Crowley shook his head mutely.

Granted, the Armageddon is a tough act to follow. Practically everything afterwards feels like a denouement, except for one fact: the angel and the demon were still alive, and both Heaven and Hell would be wrothful on a level probably never seen in the history of the world.

The two of them sprawled on a bench in the darkness beside a churchyard, trading a bottle of wine back and forth.

"I suppose I should get him to drop me off at the bookshop," Aziraphale sighed, exhausted, gazing up toward the oncoming bus that labeled its destination as Oxford but would soon be a Rather Confused London.

He was distracted by the most terribly gentle tone in Crowley's voice as he answered. "It burned down, remember?"

Crowley held the wine bottle forgotten in one hand, all his attention on his angel. "You can stay at my place, if you like."

Aziraphale experienced a rush of thought and feeling: Crowley's flat. Crowley's bed with its silver-colored duvet and down-topped mattress. No guest room. And possibly neither of them sleeping on the couch.

However danger was still dreadfully eminent – the Earth and mostly everything on it had survived Doomsday but the angel and demon waited under a typhoon wave that was building to the point of very personal annihilation.

"I don't think my side would like that," he managed.

"You don't have a side anymore." A muscle twitched high up in Crowley's sharp cheek, visible under the streetlamp. "Neither of us do. We're on our own side. Like Agnes said, we are going to have to choose our faces wisely."

Aziraphale stared off into space; the glimmer of an idea began to coalesce in his mind. Vaguely he felt Crowley hail the bus; blindly he followed his demon into the conveyance and sat down directly beside him in the tiny bench.

Their bodies touched at knee, and thigh, and hip, and arm, and shoulder. Aziraphale flashed hot and cold – with a mighty effort of concentration he summoned up the magic runes of Crowley's teeth-marks in his jacket lapel, that had connected their minds and bodies for over four years now.

 _Don't move, don't speak, don't make a sound. Don't even breathe hard_ , he thought at Crowley through those glowing red sparks, his intellect now firmly in the groove that he identified as some deeper, focused, and more dangerous part of himself.

And Crowley, who for four years had reached out with his lusting love, seeking the touch of Aziraphale's hands and finding it somehow – who now was accustomed to following Aziraphale's direction immediately and quite closely – straightened up the slightest increment in the seat, clasped his hands between his knees, and exhaled slowly to match his breathing with his angel's.

A moment later, Aziraphale murmured:  _I think I have an idea of what Ms. Nutter intended, but we have to be able to speak about it somewhere absolutely privately. Even more privately than this._

 _I know a place_ , Crowley answered, and that was all.

The bus driver dropped the two off in front of Crowley's building, and managed to get four streets over before he had a mental breakdown. Just before 3 AM he cried himself to sleep still in the driver's seat; the next morning he woke up in his own bed in Banbury and drove to the bus lot to find his bus parked perfectly in its regular spot. As if nothing had ever happened.

Crowley led the way up the stairs, each step feeling the fatigue he carried like a leaden weight on his shoulders. He looked back often and Aziraphale was always there two steps behind – smiling his gentle smile that, this time, did not reach his eyes.

Crowley unlocked the door of his flat and stepped back to let Aziraphale proceed him.

Aziraphale gave him another of those looks – all focus just above the persona of his smile, then walked into the small foyer and through the pivoting door into Crowley's office.

He paused by the ornate desk for a moment, resting his hand on the back of Crowley's throne-like chair. All the demon could do was stand to one side with his throat dry and watch the angel fill his space with his presence, mark it and claim it with his touch.

Then he glanced to the left, saw the plants in the atrium, and meandered over that way as if he had all the time in the world.

"Look at them, how lovely they are," Aziraphale said. They trembled at the sound of a new voice. "And yet they are frightened..."

Aziraphale listened for several seconds, then turned his head abruptly and fixed Crowley with his storm-cloud stare.

"You've never  **once**  put any of your plants down the garbage disposal." The angel seemed almost... outraged?

"Please," the demon tried to interrupt.

"You throw a handful of ice cubes and half a bunch of old celery into it and rev it a few times," Aziraphale continued in a relentless purr. "That covers the sound of you pulling the plant out of its pot and dumping it into a plastic bag."

"No..." Crowley sighed.

"And you show the pot around and leave it in a prominent place for a week; meanwhile as soon as you've set it down you go out with the bag. I notice there's a park across the street. Is there a little trowel in the plastic bag, for you to release the under-performing plant properly in the wooded area? I bet there would be."

Already the tremors of the houseplants were beginning to fade away.

" **Thank** you," muttered Crowley sarcastically. "I'll never restore order in here now."

His angel whirled to advance on him, their chests almost touching. The storm in his eyes looked like the weather on Venus – hot and caustic, inescapable.

"I've seen you tempt and I've seen you disrupt and I've seen you do your minor mischiefs -- but I have **never** seen you be willfully cruel to **any** living creature. Do you really wish to rule them by terror and threats of torture and destruction, as Heaven and Hell have tried to rule you and I, my love?"

Crowley shook his head mutely.

Aziraphale looked away and Crowley felt his spine melt. The angel was staring through the hall way past the atrium. Past a few doorways at the end there was a giant statue displayed on a pedestal of what appeared to be two angels... wrestling?

He looked at Crowley again and now a different sort of smile reached his eyes.  Safer, in some ways. He flicked his tongue against the back of his teeth before asking: "The kitchen is back that way?"

Crowley took a deep breath. "Kitchen to the end left, dining room to the end right. Door on the left is the entertainment room, door on the right is the half-bath."

"But none of these are the place you mentioned."

"No."

"Then take me there."

Crowley led him back through the office to the end of the other hallway, past a massive carved stone lectern in the shape of a dove with spread wings.

"The church – 1941, when the bombs fell. This was the only thing that survived, other than my books. You've kept it this whole time?"

"Of course I did," he answered, and stepped around Aziraphale to the right, into his bedroom.

The angel kept himself from uttering a brief hum of satisfaction. He'd seen this room a few hundred times over the last four plus years, of course. He'd seen every room in the flat – including the kitchen where, on a memorable occasion and now in the top five hottest memories he had, he'd gotten Crowley to bend himself over the butcher block island and grip it desperately with one hand while with the other he fucked his own ass with one of the toys Aziraphale had suggested he purchase.

Crowley'd had an Earth-shattering orgasm without even touching his genitals that time; there was no telling where all the copious amounts of ejaculate produced wound up spattered around in the spasms of ecstasy. After collapsing spent and exhausted on the marble and pearl-glass mosaic floor beside his refrigerator the demon had mumbled "I'm glad I don't actually bother to prepare food in here," and Aziraphale had been beside himself with laughter until the bond had faded away.

"Is this the place?" the angel said instead, his tone warm.

"No," Crowley replied softly. "But it's the place that I access that place most often, so it might be easier here, since this would be my first time..."

Taking another person there, he finished the thought.

Aziraphale sat down on the mattress at the foot of the bed, leaving ample space for Crowley to sit down beside him. The demon did so, and contemplated the tips of his snake-skin shoes for a long moment.

The angel knew when to be quiet; it was part of being cool, he had discovered.  In the meanwhile his own mien began to settle: here he was, bodily in the demon's own flat, even sitting on his bed... and he hadn't yet been smote by divine rage.  He'd be a fool to relax all the way but, so far so good?

After a few minutes, Crowley murmured: "Angel... do you trust me?"

Aziraphale turned and he was all Crowley's angel once more, the storms gone from his eyes.

"Of course I do, my dear."

"Then take my hand, and I'll try to bring us there."

He had turned his nearer hand palm-up; Aziraphale studied it and knew that from this instant there would truly be no turning back. If he went right now, right this very second to Heaven and absolutely begged – demanded to see God Herself and threw himself upon Her mercy, such as it might be – punishment would be severe, of course, but there was still the **slightest** chance that he would not be cast out or made to Fall.

But if he took what the demon was offering, whatever **it** might be, all hope of a reconciliation with Heaven was ended.

The angel weighed both possibilities in the balance, considering all that he'd been, seen, done, and heard of both Heaven and Crowley in the last six thousand years.  It took less than a second, for a mind as swift as his.

He laid his rounded hand into Crowley's slender palm. Crowley closed his fingers around it.

Then it was as if his entire body was being tugged into a black hole through the medium of that contact.  It would have been more distressing if Crowley wasn't also being affected and worse, objectively; for one brief second he appeared to turn inside out and his entire body to be sucked into a space that opened in the center of his chest.

An instant of blinding disorientation later they stood together in an empty desert lit by a sunless sky, still holding hands.

"Welcome," Crowley said, "to the desert of the real."

Aziraphale gasped excitedly. "Jean Baudrillard!"

"I thought it was from The Matrix, myself. Anyway, this place is mine."

"We were here earlier tonight, with the Antichrist, weren't we?" He looked around in all directions – there was not a single cloud in the sky nor any other thing on the ground other than sand dunes, not even footprints.

"You told me to come up with something or else you'd never speak to me ever again. You'd realized that thought would hurt me more than your flaming sword ever could." He shrugged one shoulder. "I did the best I could. That desert is not quite this desert. That place is the desert of Time, the one that belongs to all living beings - that they all travel through as they live but never see until they die. This... this is my little slice of that desert, made into a pocket dimension inside my soul. Here, you can see why it's mine."

He lead Aziraphale to the top of the nearest dune, and they peered down into the valley where a rough linen canopy covered a nest of carpets and pillows that seemed incongruous in the wasteland.

"I come here to sleep," Crowley explained quietly. "It's the only safe way I've found to do so while being corporeal, if you're a demon. But generally I prefer the lights off."

"Show me," Aziraphale said, not letting go of his hand.

Crowley made no gesture, no snap of his fingers – but night fell over the desert and a spangle of millions of stars filled the vault of the sky, as if all the diamonds of the world had been scattered over a cloak of midnight blue velvet.

They walked down the dune together, coming to the tent where one single small oil lamp did not so much light the gloom as defined the shapes inside it. Aziraphale noticed there was no heat of a regular desert here. In fact with the light gone from the sky the air had turned moderately chilly. No breeze blew to disturb the sand, although the angel got the feeling their footsteps would vanish from the dunes as soon as they'd stepped away from them.

Nothing changed here but what Crowley wanted changed.

The demon paused at the edge of the tent to remove his shoes and Aziraphale did also, quick to pick up on local mores as always. They stepped barefooted together on the intricate hand-knotted carpets and there Crowley seemed to lose his line of thought, gazing down at the angel who gazed up at him.

The angel wasn't sure if he realized their fingers were now interwoven. He stepped somewhat in front of him, to look up into and past the sunglasses he still wore. "So here," whispered Aziraphale, "you believe we can truly be alone."

"Yes," Crowley answered. "Heaven's lot likes to think they make windows into men's souls, but demons' souls are of course immune to their powers; it's a side effect of the Fall. And Hell works from the outside in on a soul. They tempt and persuade, and get access by invitation only. They wouldn't even know where to begin, trying to find my stronghold – and even Lord Satan himself would fail, attempting it. As far as I know only God Herself could find us here. Assuming She wanted to."

Aziraphale nodded; nothing in the universe could be more private than that. There was no place that God was not, even in the deepest pits of Hell itself if some of the psalms and proverbs were to be believed.

"I think we have a couple more hours in the real world, although Time passes differently here. It was rounding midnight when we got to my building and the Antichrist isn't quite finished yet. I'd wager it'll take him until the witching hour to decide how best to finish reshaping the world."

"I thought he wasn't the son of Satan anymore!"

"He's not." Crowley's smile was small and lopsided, filled with quiet pain. "But just because you reject your maker – or your maker discards you – doesn't mean you stop being what you really are inside."

"And Heaven and Hell are both holding their breaths, waiting to see–"

"How it all shakes out, yeah. I imagine Adam will try to put it as close back to whatever it been as he can, maybe with a few small tweaks here and there. He's a sensible lad; he'll do alright."

"But both Hosts are going to come back soon after, wanting vengeance. Against us."

"Exactly. And the way that we survive it--"

"Is to trade places, somehow. But that's the part I'm not quite sure how to do!"

Crowley squeezed his hand comfortingly. "But I am. I do it all the time, and I'm doing it right now. And if I can do it, I know you can. Shut your eyes and look back out into the universe. Look back into my bedroom and see what you see there."

Aziraphale did as instructed, opening his inner eyes and focusing on the place that was Not Here. He saw Crowley's bed as if he hovered over it – and Crowley was laying on it all alone, flat on his back with his eyes closed and his hands by his sides.

"That's an Appearance. It looks like me, and it can interact a little bit like me, but it can't much move or do anything else unless someone's actively powering and directing it every step of the way. It's a bit like the ansaphone in that fashion. It's an image, a seeming – but to all occult and ethereal and magical senses it  **is**  me. It even has its own aura, scent, weight, clothing, et cetera."

Aziraphale blinked and gazed up at his demon again.

"Tomorrow when you leave," Crowley continued, "we will both go out, wearing each other's Appearances. To Heaven I will look and smell and move and breathe just like you do, and to Hell you will seem just the same as I am. So they will take us separately, switched."

"They will mean to do something... awful. Both Hosts will!"

The demon nodded. "We will be playing with fire. But if Agnes Nutter was right--"

"She  **always**  was!"

"Then this is the only way we can survive it, and survive it we must." His teeth flashed in the gleam of the stars as he smiled slowly. "Seems to me we might have something worth surviving for."

Aziraphale released his hand to get closer still. Chest to chest, his loving gaze never faltered as he reached up and gently removed the demon's sunglasses – and the demon allowed him to do it.

"You don't need these when we're alone, my love."

The slitted topaz eyes studied his expression for a small eternity; his hands came up and met behind the angel's back, holding him against his body.

"You said you loved my eyes," Crowley whispered, "the first night you made love to me."

A bolt of shock pierced Aziraphale from head to foot, as if he'd been struck by lightning. His mouth gaped like a gasping fish, quite unbecomingly, until he found his voice again. "You knew. You knew it was all real! When did you figure it out?!"

"That very first time, angel. Since the first moment I saw my own reflection after the Fall, I've despised my eyes: this outward sign that I had questioned too much of the Divine Plan. This branding directly on my face that I wasn't good enough to be loved by the God we'd all been **told** was Love incarnate. It wasn't any part of my mind, conscious or not, that could have said what you said to me. Only you."

"And everything – that we did, that you let me talk you into, every step of the way --"

"After you mentioned my eyes, I reminded you that you'd called me your love. I asked if you loved me, really loved me." That sweet vulnerability was in his voice, here in the gentle darkness of lost Time. His arms tightened to embrace Aziraphale. "And you... you said that you did, you swore it; you wept and I could hear it in your voice that you loved me and that it brought you joy so deep, so abiding, that it moved you to tears.

"For you, with you, I was willing to try just about anything. Because you said you loved me, when even God didn't."

Aziraphale buried his face against Crowley's black lapel, pressing fresh tears into it.

"And do you still, my angel? Here, after the world's end?"

"Yes!" he sobbed. "I love you – I love you so!"

Crowley slid his hands up Aziraphale's sides, cradled his face so gently between his palms and tilted it up to bind his lips with a passionate, lingering kiss. How long had they waited, to do this in body as they'd fantasized over and over in their shared thoughts?

Empires rose and fell, worlds began and ended, suns were born and died in magnificent supernovas --  all within the duration of that kiss.

Aziraphale broke away eventually, full of his own dangerous questions. He leaned his forehead against the demon's cheek. "Why didn't you tell me you knew?"

"Why didn't  **you**  tell  **me**  it was real?" His warm amusement was rich and dark like the best chocolate.

"Because I thought... that you might run away from it. Or worse... that you might run toward it, and me, before the time was right. And that could have gotten both of us annihilated."

"But you kept it up, anyway." Crowley took Aziraphale's unresisting wrist in one hand and raised it to press a kiss into his palm.

The angel squirmed. "I... I needed it, too."

"Mmm?"

"I... may have inadvertently made a vow, that time we were stuck in the closet together."

"Oh?"

"You were so close to coming and I could feel it; I was feeling such empathy – I was so open to you that when you came, I was going to come too. And I swore it in my soul: not without you, not ever again."

Crowley chuckled softly. "So after that you couldn't get off without getting me off somehow too, hmm?"

"Something like that," Aziraphale answered in leaden tones. It still wasn't very funny at all.

"So I've just been a means to an end – izzat right?"

Shocked, the angel looked up to read his expression.

Only the same quiet amusement was written there.

"Never!" he breathed at last.

Crowley bent and, not dropping his citrine gaze, pressed his lips to the pulse in Aziraphale's wrist.

"Seems to me it's not quite been fair," the demon murmured. "All the attention all on me and making my body feel things and hardly anything just for you, ever since that night. Should we survive this... I think I should turn the tables on you, and show you how much I've learned."

Those beautiful golden eyes were dancing with desire and a wicked humor. Aziraphale felt the trembling in his midsection as he had once, with Oscar.

Now he knew what it meant: there might be a chance to surrender safely, in body, mind, and soul. There might be a chance to give all of himself, both the light and the dark, to someone who could not only receive it without wounding either of them but would delight in every facet of it.

Now... it would be **right**.

Crowley stepped backward, drawing Aziraphale along with him.

"On your midnight pallet lying," the demon quoted,

"Listen, and undo the door:  
Lads that waste the light in sighing  
In the dark should sigh no more;  
Night should ease a lover's sorrow;  
Therefore, since I go to-morrow,  
Pity me before."

Another step, and another, and they were away from the faint lamp light and toward the nest of pillows and blankets. He continued, his smile unfaltering:

"In the land to which I travel,  
The far dwelling, let me say --  
Once, if here the couch is gravel,  
In a kinder bed I lay,  
And the breast the darnel smothers  
Rested once upon another's  
When it was not clay."

The demon sank down into the nest and Aziraphale followed willingly, almost spell-bound. "A. E. Housman," the angel said.

"I don't read so much as you do, but I do know what I like. Housman had been in love with his best friend for ages. The man knew a thing or two about pining."

"And fear of dying." Crowley was settled comfortably on his back; Aziraphale slid into the place the demon opened for him in the sheltering crook of one arm, laying with his head on Crowley's shoulder.

"Well, I'm hoping you and I turn out a bit better than all he got, the poor thing."

His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me, thought Aziraphale. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples – _for I am faint with love._

He played with the ends of Crowley's lariat scarf, then slid one hand into the unbuttoned neck of his shirt to feel the warmth of his demon's heart beating under his fingers.

"And you, my demon – do you love me?"

He leaned in and kissed Aziraphale's forehead. "Aren't you sure of it by now, what with one thing and another across the millennia?"

"I mean it, Crowley!"

Crowley's hand found its way into Aziraphale's short hair, caressing his scalp for a languid moment – then briefly tightening into a fist that jolted Lust throughout the seraphic being cradled on his chest.

"I love you," he whispered. "I've loved you since I first met you. Since I first heard you say that you'd given that big flaming sword to those two desperately vulnerable mortals: you were kind, simply because they needed kindness and you could provide it."

The fist relaxed, and became a gentle massage once more.

"And then as the first rain fell over God's abandoned garden you extended your wing over me and I moved under it. So close I could smell you, practically taste you - and you were everything of Heaven that I had ever missed. You were the best part of all of God's creation, and I've never found anything since then to surpass you.

"Yes, angel. I love you, now and always."

Their breathing synchronized in the silence of the pocket universe. Aziraphale became aware that he was at one and the same time both incredibly relaxed, and incredibly aroused.

"Crowley--"

"I know. I feel it too." The demon chuckled. "Inside and out. And if we had more time you'd be on your back in this nest and I'd finally get to... well, any number of things. I've been making quite a list over the centuries."

"But we don't have much time," Aziraphale completed the thought.

"And you've had me, after a fashion, in a few hundred different ways that an angel could have a demon if they were both willing. Yet haven't you noticed that the bond always fades back out not long after we've climaxed?"

"Of course."

"I've wanted to hold you," Crowley admitted, a hint of that vulnerability displacing some of his humor. "I've wanted to relax in the afterglow and feel you near me, holding me too. And I will be **damned** ," he said deliberately, "if I go to 'that far dwelling,' to what is possibly my **destruction** without getting to embrace you for a while here in the privacy of my soul, and love you the way you deserve to be loved."

He shifted on his side toward the angel and pulled him closer, tangling their still-clothed legs together, their hearts beating side by side within twinned rib-cages.

"Hold me then," Aziraphale whispered, and kissed him once more.  

They lay there in that kinder bed for several hours, studying each other's faces as if it might be the last time they looked upon them, caressing and kissing in a languor that belied the destiny that awaited them.

As if they had forever, to wake anew the love and passion in each other's fleshes. As if they had eternity, to sate that same desire and longing once more.

Crowley twitched at one point. "Three AM," he whispered to Aziraphale. "My Appearance senses that the universe has changed in several ways."

"How much longer do you think we have?"

Crowley's face twisted into a brief snarl of helpless rage. "Two or three more hours there, at best. We should probably get into our costumes and start moving about at dawn."

Aziraphale shifted. "What I wouldn't give," he replied stridently, "to be inside you. I want to live in your very skin. I want to be inseparable from your own soul."

"You will be in my skin, beloved – or else our charade won't work." The demon gave a short little laugh. "And you already are a part of my soul, as I am in yours. That's how we will win this.  Both Hosts fail to understand what we are to each other, and how far we're willing to go."

Crowley pressed kisses to Aziraphale's face and throat and fingers then, everywhere he could reach without undressing him, knowing some temptations were too much for both of them. He caressed his angelic lover and steadied him with a feigned courage that couldn't quite find a true expression in his heart.

He could all too easily imagine what might happen when Heaven and Hell got their respective hands on what they thought were their respective prodigals.

He'd already Fallen before, after all.

If it would only save his beloved angel from that agony, he would - and must - endure that Fall again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know nothing about Banbury and Oxford except that they look relatively close on a map (for an American) and the name sounded nice; I'm giving zero fucks about the realism of bus routes in England.
> 
> I've believed that Crowley has practiced a merciful release program on his under-performing plants ever since I first read the book; the show got a bit more complex so I made his program more complex to match.
> 
> Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulacra and Simulation, which helped to inspire The Matrix movies (of which there are two, it's a shame they didn't make a trilogy, so sad) so technically both Crowley and Aziraphale are correct.
> 
> A.E.Housman is tragic and also made for pining. He wrote a poem about Oscar Wilde's trial called "Oh Who Is That Young Sinner". Hmmmm.
> 
> These two dumb pining bastards and my Muse have ganged up on me to demand a full SEVEN chapters. Guys, I have laundry that needs folding! >:(


	6. Defying Conventions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale leaned in. “Do you understand what happened yesterday?”
> 
> “Well, I understand some of it. But some of it...” The sounds of the brass band swelled in the afternoon air – _I'm bound to be proposing on a Saturday night, I'll be –_ “well, it's just a little bit too, uh...”
> 
> INEFFABLE, filled in the dark shape standing nearby. The pigeons feeding nearby flew away with alacrity, having a better sense of both foreshadowing and self-preservation than most creatures.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Usually I write tipsy and edit sober. Because I hate editing and it's been a long day but I still want to release this chapter into the wild tonight, I'm doing it reverse here. Results may vary.
> 
> I shit you not, Elvis Presley's "Devil In Disguise" came on as I was editing this chapter.
> 
> Shaun_of_the_Dead_v("It's on random!");

Crowley waited out the last hours in something that was almost close to a real Heaven, he thought.

Aziraphale had eventually nodded off in his embrace and the demon was watching him sleep. If he'd had his way, he'd be able to watch him for as long as he needed to rest – holding him pillowed on his shoulder, breathing in his sweet exhalations, watching the fluttering of his eyelids and wondering what he dreamed.

Crowley liked to sleep because he liked to dream, and for the most part he dreamed about Aziraphale. Nothing terribly erotic over the millennia (no, that was saved for waking hours of afternoon fantasies and midnight insomniac longings) but regular life things like walking in the park together, having dinner together, seeing the opera together, having a little brandy in the stock room of the bookshop before Crowley of course had to go home.

The demon remembered a version of the afterlife he'd heard about once, and how funny he used to think it was. In this Heaven everything was exactly the same: if you died a prince, you were still a prince... and if you died a latrine digger you were still a latrine digger. Your days in the afterlife passed exactly as they had before death – working, sleeping, the little distractions of hobbies and romance and sport. The only difference was that you always had enough to eat, every day.

Crowley wasn't laughing about it now. That's what his dreams had been: always doing the various mundane things with Aziraphale, the tiny interactions that would forever mean so much. The only difference is that they could do it openly, without fear of Hell or Heaven.

He wished he dared sleep too; he'd reached a level of exhaustion he couldn't remember feeling since the fourteenth century. But at least in the fourteenth century the Infernal Host wasn't out there baying for his blood.

And if he and his angel didn't deal with this issue right now they might as well just shut the door and stay in this pocket dimension for eternity because nothing in the human realm would be anywhere approaching safe ever again.

A tendril of contact to his Appearance on the mortal plane and he sighed; false dawn was fading. It was time. He stroked his fingertips along Aziraphale's cheek, lightening the sky in his pocket dimension to mimic the oncoming sunrise of Earth.

"Hey... hey, angel... time to wake up. We've got to get going soon."

"Mmmm," he sighed. The blue eyes fluttered open, looking up at him sleep-drunk and guileless. "Hey, handsome."

Crowley swallowed the lump in his throat and was careful to give one of his regular devil-may-care smirks. "Look who's talking. It's time we get our plans in order."

A gentle dawn held itself around the dunes; the lovers broke apart far enough to sit cross-legged facing each other in the nest of pillows and blankets and talk strategy.

"Do you remember all the higher staff in Heaven?"

"The ones that didn't Fall with the rest of us? Can't forget the smug bastards; I'm solid on that. What about you – does Heaven happen to have intel on what the dukes and lords of Hell look like these days?"

"Not near so much as they'd like... and never so much that I could trust I'd recognize them properly on sight."

So Crowley gave him a crash course in the Who's Who of Hell, feeling his heart break with affection at the look of intense concentration on Aziraphale's face. The angel might forget which place in London was the third alternate rendezvous half the time, but when it really mattered he could memorize the Brixton phone book and recite it back to you.

"Now, to learn how to make and keep up Appearances. Possibly the easiest part would be for you to practice going out into mine and coming back here. The way's open – once you've been to my stronghold and you have my consent, you can come and go here as you please, any time you please, from anywhere in the human world. So look back out into the real world, and step into the body that is sitting on the corner of the bed."

Aziraphale settled back on his haunches, straightened his spine, shut his eyes – and disappeared. Crowley watched him through his inner gaze as the Appearance of Crowley on the bed slowly looked around the room, then lifted each hand in turn.

Then Aziraphale was back with him in the pocket universe. "It feels bizarre," he said in disturbed tones. "It's like wearing two entire sets of clothes, one on top of the other."

"You'll have some time to practice and get used to it once I've gone out to take a look at what's left of your shop; I'll want you to wait and give me an hour or two's head start. Now, the next step is for you to make an Appearance of yourself for me. Feel your own body right now -"

Aziraphale gave him a look that was positively salacious.

"I mean, feel it as a thing that you possess. It isn't yourself; it's only an item. It's not 'who you are' – it's not 'you'. It's something that surrounds you. Take that feeling and push it back out into the human plane of existence. Make it sit on the other corner of the bed beside mine."

"But won't that just send my physical body back out into the world? I mean, I'm always conscious of the fact that it's a body and not the same as my actual eternal self."

The demon considered this for a moment; it was a valid question and since he'd devised most of his little tricks on his own, he had no experience in receiving instruction that he could then pass on to someone else.

"Think of the Mona Lisa," he murmured at last. "Millions upon millions of people have seen her in person, and hundreds of millions more have seen her represented in the media. She's practically the most studied and popular painting in history."

"Of course."

"And yet... there's so much that people believe about her that is just plain wrong. They think she's a freaking huge canvas, when really she's like an eighty by fifty centimeter wooden plank."

Aziraphale just stared at him.

"So if you took all those millions, possibly billions, of ideas and thoughts about the Mona Lisa over the centuries and you averaged them altogether – you would probably get a concept that was rather close to reality. Humans are good like that, in if you ask just one of them about something they'll probably get it wrong... but average out the answer of hundreds of them and you'll hit the mark.

"So think of a layer that sits just on top of your skin, angel – a layer comprised of every glance that's been put your way over the millennia, by angels and demons and humans. Every time someone's seen you and thought about you, whether they were projecting some sort of reflection of themselves or they were actually experiencing you.

"The gestalt of all those ideas surrounding you, pushed out into the world and made its own simulacrum for a while, is an Appearance."

The angel shut his eyes and frowned in concentration; a tiny line appeared between his eyebrows and Crowley quietly endured, as he had for six millennia, the urge to lick it. If he stuck his forked tongue out all the way he'd barely even have to lean forward to do it.

"All right – take a look; I think I've done it."

And he had. There was a perfect replica of Aziraphale sitting on the other corner of the bed, complete in every detail down to the prim little knots of his shoe laces.

"My clever darling," Crowley purred his approval. "So are we ready to go?"

Aziraphale bit his lip. "... Must we?"

"Yeahhh... I think we gotta. But hey, it's just the standard old walk about, make our presences known, meet up at St. James around 1PM and compare notes. Nothing funny. You know they might not even have the guts to do anything."  
  
They both knew it was a lie. Both Heaven and Hell needed scapegoats for yesterday's colossal cock-up of an Armageddon, and it was a question of "when" far more than "if".

Aziraphale reached out to take his face between his palms and pull their foreheads together, breathing him in. "No matter what happens... know that I love you."

"No matter what happens. I love you. Always have."

"And I always will."

"Always and forever, angel. So let's get on with it. Soonest gone, soonest back."

One last kiss, for luck. Crowley shut his eyes – the better to memorize every sensation in this moment.

Then Aziraphale was gone and his demon followed, shunting themselves into their new Appearances.

"Aziraphale" stood up in the mortal plane, settling his jacket, tugging down his waist-coat, then adjusting his bow-tie. He turned to look down at "Crowley" and smiled a smile of such enduring sweetness that the angel was pierced to the quick – how closely his demon had studied him, to know that expression and be able to duplicate it so well!

"Thank you," his soft and cultured voice emanated from that mirror image, "for a most lovely evening. See you in the afternoon, my dear?"

"Yeah," the being in black croaked, remembering to lounge back on one elbow on the mattress as if it took all the weight of his upper half to balance that of his pelvis. "See you then."

"Crowley" shut his eyes and stayed on the bed; he listened as the apparent angel made his way to the door and left the flat. Then he got up and paced the bedroom slowly and deliberately.

Aziraphale had no idea how the demon did it; this thing felt all wrong. It really was like wearing a full suit on top of another suit. Like trousers on top of pants on top of trousers on top of pants – it felt like at least four wedgies just waiting to happen.

Ah! That was it! The demon simply magicked his clothes into existence instead of properly buying bespoke – so he was basically naked inside whatever Appearance he wore.

Aziraphale felt all fluttery, and covered it with a low cough as he sank back down onto the mattress. His demon was naked inside an Appearance of his own body... what daydreams he wanted to have about that. Maybe there was some fun they could have with –

No. Business first, and pray to Somebody that time for fun later would still exist.

He sat up on the bed and did the strange mental/spiritual flip that took him back into Crowley's pocket universe; the transit got easier and quicker every time he practiced it. He was standing beside the little Bedouin canopy that shielded Crowley's bed-nest, even though the angel was sure that practically nothing like weather happened in this tiny dimension.

Mmm; there was no place to hang clothing here. Aziraphale thought about it for a few more seconds, then placed his hands together, palms touching. He opened them slowly and a blue light filled the space between them, consolidating into a window and then (as he spread his arms wider) a doorway into what appeared to be a clothing closet. It had wooden sides and a metal rod with a few nice wooden hangers dangling from it, and even a light-bulb in the ceiling that was already switched on.

Aziraphale undressed carefully, hanging up each garment and folding his small clothes to put in a dresser that helpfully manifested to receive them. Then, standing naked on the sand, he closed up his own pocket dimension again.

Hmmm – his dimension inside of his soul inside of Crowley's dimension inside of Crowley's soul. He wondered if he could make his dimension bigger as Crowley had done, and then perhaps they could even put another one inside it of something of the both of them.

It was a bit like a matryoshka doll, if you could open the smallest doll and it had the biggest one inside it. A dimension like that, inside both an ethereal and an infernal soul, would be utterly safe from anything that either Host could attempt.

Something to think about, assuming they survived.

Aziraphale stepped back out into Crowley's Appearance and now it felt alright – like wearing one or two layers of clothing instead of four or five. Yet he was conscious of the fact that Crowley's magically summoned clothing was... well...

It was inferior, that's what it was! And he refused to apologize for the thought because he was here alone and Crowley would never know.

However: if Aziraphale was going to what might very well be his own obliteration, he would be dam– he would be bles– he'd be absolutely **buggered** if he was going to do it in prêt-à-porter!

It's not that Crowley didn't have standards, he thought as he miracled new clothing into existence and laid it out on the bed – all of it practically identical to what the Appearance was already wearing but with the hand-stitching and little details that really elevated an outfit to a proper status...

It's just that Crowley's, mmmm, values were perhaps elsewhere?

And so much red! Touches of crimson everywhere in this garment – Crowley was all of red and black, even as a serpent, whereas Aziraphale did dearly love his comfortable warm browns and creamy off-whites...

Well. Nobody would notice if he changed the collar just a bit. Just to remind himself that even though he might be dragged into Hell wearing his lover's Appearance and no one in Heaven would care, he was still an angel.

Even if just to Crowley.

He banished the Appearance's magic clothing without a thought, then realized and looked down.

Oh my Somebody. He'd seen this body from this same vantage point as if through a glass darkly: an image overlaid on whatever his gaze took in or on the twilight behind his eyelids. It was his first time seeing it in person.

As it were.

He ran nimble long fingers over "his" chest, where sparse red hairs bridged the gap between two delicious little nipples he'd been aching to suck. And speaking of suck...

Further down the taut flat plane of Crowley's abdomen hung a cock that matched the rest of his serpentine self. Long and not quite slender, it was a perfect mouth size: enough to easily breach the back of Aziraphale's throat when it was properly roused, and round out his lips.

He gave it a stroke or two – but no. Even Appearances knew his vow and it was no use; without Crowley actually present physically or spiritually, nothing could come of playtime.

So he dressed himself slowly in the new and better suit, fingering the tartan collar that lay around the back of his neck like a fallen halo. Time to practice sauntering around, swinging this sizable piece by the metronome of his hips.

Meanwhile, Crowley wearing Aziraphale's face had strolled the few kilometers from his flat to where the bookshop had been. He could have taken a cab, sure – but he wanted to be alone with his thoughts for a while.

Aziraphale. His angel.

He was... so beautiful. Crowley'd never thought he'd get to lay hands, much less lips, on a creature so perfect, so wonderful.

Perfectly perplexing – and wonderfully **frustrating!**

All of his little foibles and his put-upon fussiness that was 95% for show, Crowley was certain. And his previous constant inability to admit what Crowley had tried to coax forth for millennia: yes, this is real. Yes, we really do feel things for each other. Yes, we might be – no, are ABSOLUTELY -- more closely connected to one another than we are to our Hosts and their Lords (or Ladies, or Theydies, as the case might be).

Thank Somebody, the Near-Miss of Doomsday may have finally resolved that issue.

And all these daylight fantasies these last four years – the demon had gone back and forth thinking that there must be an actual connection between both of their conscious souls; or that he was fooling himself with such a magnificent imagining that it came up with dark, delectable, incredible ideas of how to attempt to pleasure a body, ideas that Crowley had never discovered in his brief ventures into pornography.

Or that he was going mad. That had been a possibility also.

It had been more than gratifying to see the shock on Aziraphale's face when he said he'd known all along. Well, he had been **pretty** sure, at least.

What he hadn't yet had a chance to mention was that after those little mind games (so to speak) had started, Crowley had gone around to look at and read more porn. He'd kept one thought squarely in the forefront of his mind: "what if this wasn't two random humans... but me and Aziraphale?"

From there, his education had become a very pleasant distraction from the looming Apocalypse. At least once a week and sometimes more, Crowley and Aziraphale would commune in the shadows of their souls. The angel would suggest things and the demon would try them on himself to what appeared to be their mutual satisfaction. Then when the initial orgasmic haze cleared, Crowley would go to the internet.

He'd open a search engine, type in a rough description of what Aziraphale had dictated – and the internet would helpfully provide several similar examples and offer suggestions of other acts that had been enjoyed by people on similar searches.

He'd gone down the rabbit hole with far more gusto in these past four years – always led by the thought "what if that were me and him? What if he was doing that to me? Or I to him?"

There was only ever, had only ever been, one "him".

And Crowley had learned much, both from his beloved teacher and from his time on the internet – and had at last found the things he truly enjoyed. The things that while watching, even with two human strangers involved in it, still made him feel joy and passion on a level beyond the physical.

He'd dimly sensed that Aziraphale's pleasure was bound up in his own, somehow. With this new information regarding the angel's vow, it would be interesting to see how it meshed with Crowley's as-yet unshared new hobby...

Then the demon found himself standing in the center of the street looking up into the sunrise – over Aziraphale's completely undamaged shop.

Just as he'd expected; thank Adam. What a great kid. With absolutely no effort, interference, or conflicting values foisted on him from either side, he'd turned out quite well.

The shop door opened obediently at his approach; Crowley using Aziraphale's Appearance strolled slowly through the shop, touching things here and there. To an observer he might have appeared very restrained; to a specialized observer he would have been seen to be working very hard.

He was in fact re-memorizing the state of the bookshop and every single object within it at a molecular level, and comparing it with the previous version stored in his memory.

For a mind that could and had in the past created nebulae dozens of light-minutes across, carefully balancing the ratios of dust and gasses so as to make them "star nurseries" – the breeding grounds of new stellar systems – this was relatively simple.

He continued his orderly way through until he reached Aziraphale's antique writing desk. There on the top-most shelf was a full first-edition collection of Richmal Crompton's "Just William" series.

Crowley raised his Appearance's eyebrows. "Those are new," he murmured.

He continued his review; everything else in the shop was pretty much as expected. The stock room had the exact same boxes and contents within it as it had on Friday – although the framed poster in the public restroom opposite the mirror appeared to be the enlarged cover art of a novel about a detective who was also a pirate, and cowboys and dinosaurs and some sort of alien saucers might be involved somehow. Huh.

Then, tucked away in an alcove just before the emergency exit doorway was another little wooden door he'd never noticed before, marked with a sign: "Staff Only".

"Aziraphale" smiled wryly. He wasn't staff, he was a freelance. But even he knew the rules...

At the same time, though: if he was going to duplicate the entire bookshop in his pocket dimension (because he would rather gnaw his entire right arm off than watch his angel's beloved books burn ever again), he would have to know all of it.

So he put his hand to the doorknob, and the door opened at his touch.  When it closed behind him, it bolted itself out of habit.

At the end of a short hallway there was a small locker-type closet with half a dozen hangers in it. Crowley turned to the right, where the room opened up – and here it all was. He'd wondered where Aziraphale's Regency silver snuff boxes got off to now that he had the shop and didn't keep separate apartments; they were here in drawers and on shelves. Whenever he couldn't see them he could feel them through his extended senses.

Everything that was precious to Aziraphale, even more precious than the general contents of the rest of the shop, was in this little room. Books he would rather be utterly destroyed than to ever sell, his gold toga clasp from 41 AD, a folio of Shakespeare's plays published in 1601, a linen napkin from a small Parisian crêpes restaurant in 1793, the now-notorious signed Oscar Wilde first editions... Crowley felt it: the overwhelming sense of Love that Aziraphale had mentioned in Tadfield and the demon had desperately and vehemently pled innocence of.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks..."

There was a ladder to a space above the shelves and drawers. Crowley stepped up one or two rungs until he could see in. It was a loft bed just under the ceiling itself, a nest made with a dozen thick down comforters and at least six large pillows. The largest pillow was at the head of the bed and, halfway down the wall away from it was a hook. From the hook hung a wooden hanger, and on the hanger was Aziraphale's suit jacket.

The impression of Crowley's bite-mark, left there over four years ago, was as fresh as the night he'd made it. Suddenly it seemed he could smell sawdust and Pine-sol, and the overwhelming surge of emotion was enough to make him giddy. He clung to the wooden sides of the ladder tightly; the pressure of the old pine under his palms helping to ground him in a beautiful reality where for just one moment everything seemed possible.

All this, he thought. All this too will I recreate in my little universe.

Aziraphale in Crowley's Appearance had finally figured things out enough to brave the outside world; he was swaggering down the sidewalk when he saw the most wonderful thing parked on the distant kerb: Crowley's Bentley had been restored!

Ahh, the grand old car. He thought for just an instant about seeing if it would respond to him (as he knew his bookshop obeyed Crowley instantly, the sappy thing) but decided not to test it, hailing a cab instead.

They met in St. James Park, as if all were well and it was just another Sunday.

"A strawberry lolly and, aaaaa... vanilla with a flake, please," said the apparent demon, passing pound coins over to the vendor.

"How's the car?" the apparent angel asked, in carefully controlled tones.

"Not a scratch on it. How's the bookshop?"

"Not a smudge. Not a book burned." He paced to "Crowley's" other side. "Everything back, just the way it was." He accepted the ice cream, not quite knowing what to do with it. "You heard from your people yet?"

A shake of the head. Am I really that short? Aziraphale thought. "Yours?"

"Nothing."

Aziraphale leaned in. "Do you understand what happened yesterday?"

"Well, I understand some of it. But some of it..." The sounds of the brass band swelled in the afternoon air – _I'm bound to be proposing on a Saturday night, I'll be –_ "well, it's just a little bit too, uh..."

INEFFABLE, filled in the dark shape standing nearby. The pigeons feeding nearby flew away with alacrity, having a better sense of both foreshadowing and self-preservation than most creatures.

Aziraphale gestured with the strawberry dessert. "Oh, that's – that's funny, seeing him here. That's meant to be bad luck."

The figure disappeared – and so did much of the nearby Sunday park crowd that had seemed to shield them. Aziraphale wearing Crowley's Appearance pivoted in place, shocked.

"Aziraphale" had been both bound and gagged in an instant ( **later** , the angel cautioned that thought) and was being dragged away by some of the smarmiest bastards of Heaven's Host.

"Renegade angels all tied up with strings," declaimed Uriel.

"These are a few of our favorite things," Sandalphon recited.

They turn and ran, bundling "Aziraphale" into a conveyance no one else in the park seemed to see.

"Stop! Stop them!"

But before he could give chase a crow bar met the back of Aziraphale's head, knocking him to the pavement.

His vision of the park swimming, he pushed himself up on his elbows. Good, he was still keeping up his Appearance. This was what he and his demon had wanted to happen, right? They had chosen their faces and their shared side as wisely as they could – for soon enough they would be playing with fire.

Aziraphale rolled onto one snaky hip to look up into the gruesome visage of Hastur.

Suddenly this didn't seem like such a brilliant idea.

"It's not a problem," the angel assured himself as the world spun around him drunkenly. "It's tickety-boo."

The cement path rose up to meet his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Michael Sheen is welcome to read and comment on my works; he is my new patron god of fanfiction and I really hope he bookmarks this. Somebody let me know if he tweets about it; I am not on the Twitter as much as I'd like. Mr. Sheen is wonderful and I love him.
> 
> In my head canon -- Aziraphale's first, last, and only experience of the Mona Lisa (outside of the sketch in Crowley's flat) was the movie Ever After (1998) so he too thought it was a big ol' piece of canvas.
> 
> Crowley's tongue is sixteen inches long, pass it on.
> 
> Prêt-à-porter, so Google tells me, is the fashion (read: French) term for off-the-rack, non-tailored clothing. I feel this would offend Aziraphale on a visceral level. Clothing... that just ANYONE could buy and wear? How dare you, sir. My personal tailor knows exactly how much additional room I need in the groin.
> 
> I got detail on costuming from this great article: <https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/how-good-omens-costume-designer-dressed-the-shows-handsome-devils-and-angels>
> 
> Hey, here's a fun thing to do: see how many times in the miniseries (and under what conditions) Crowley actually stands on Aziraphale's *right* side instead of his left. Then realize how intimate the car scenes feel because of this.
> 
> Hey, speaking of! I have Car/BookshopMeta as well as Bed/BedroomMeta. Give me an excuse to comment about it. :)
> 
> The boys (and the Muse) are trying to talk me into another chapter BUT I REFUSE. Seven chapters, by the gods, even if the last one winds up being 30,000 words. My laundry STILL has not been folded.
> 
> (Sooo, if it takes longer than a week to write you'll just have to bear with me. I promise it'll be less than a month, as I really do have original work that needs doing also...)


	7. Coming Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And, just as in Heaven, nobody had a sense of humor.
> 
> Still, the angel was sailing along just like a swan – pretty white wings on top (er, somewhere?) and paddling like the dickens underneath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have stopped making demands or even trying to bargain with the Muse; I am laying back and thinking of England. It'll take however long it'll take. Turns out we were able to find a chapter division here with a bit of a cliff-hanger, so we'll have an auspicious 8 chapters instead. Er... probably?

Some of this next part you may already know. Some, but not all.

They'd tied his wrists, Aziraphale-as-Crowley noticed, but they'd left the rest of him unharmed while he was unconscious. Red rope, even. Apparently Hell had a thing for bondage.

Just keep talking, Aziraphale thought. Crowley's so smooth. He'd say this, right? He'd be so brave. Wait, am I babbling?

"Silenzzzzzzzz," buzzed Beelzebub.

Every surface in here was filthy, and the smell was **not** to be believed.

"So, four of us. Rubber of bridge? Barbershop quartet?"

And, just as in Heaven, nobody had a sense of humor.

Still, the angel was sailing along just like a swan – pretty white wings on top (er, somewhere?) and paddling like the dickens underneath.

Lord Beelzebub, right. Hastur, got it. Name-dropped Dagon successfully, recognized by the shiny scales on their face, almost a comely iridescence.

This was a rigged court and no doubt, but Aziraphale would not have expected anything else from Hell.

"Guys, you shouldn't have gone to all the trouble. What appears to be the problem?"

Elsewhere... a higher plane, perhaps.

They'd tied his wrists to the chair, Crowley-as-Aziraphale noticed, but they'd left the rest of him unharmed while he was unconscious. White rope, even. Apparently Heaven had a thing for bondage.

"Ahh, Aziraphale – so glad you could join us." What was with this **touching other people** bullshit? The demon looked up at Gabriel's big stupid head and imagined five of the weirdest torments in Hell happening in, around, and to it... and almost lost the thread.

New associate? What new associate? "I think you're going to like this"? Crowley's suspicion ratcheted up another two notches. He raised a brow and tried to smile like Aziraphale when all he wanted to do was bare his fangs.

Down in Hell the kangaroo court continued, listing all of Crowley's crimes... murdered a fellow demon? He **had** had a busy morning yesterday!

"Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" shouted the assembled Infernal Host, quite surprising Aziraphale out of his thoughts.

"Do you have anything to say... before we take our vengeance on you?"

Startled by the question – I mean, after all, Heaven never wanted to hear anything I had to say, whether or not they were about to discipline me – Aziraphale answered truthfully.

"What's it gonna be? An eternity in the deepest pit?"

Because that was the worst possible sentencing he could think of. It was highly unlikely that he'd be able to get back into Crowley's pocket dimension with Crowley's soul on an entirely different plane of existence from the angel. Trapped here far from his demon for the rest of all time, alone and in the most hostile of territories...

"No no, we're going to do something even worse. Letting the punishment fit the crime," growled Hastur.

The elevator dinged.

For Aziraphale, his intellect churning as fast as it ever had, the penny began to drop.

"The Archangel Michael? That's …unlikely," he said, remembering to use Crowley's voice. An Archangel, cooperating directly with Hell? The bad angels went all the way to the top! Did the Metatron know?

Did **God** know?

How could She **not?**

Michael began to pour from the limitless vessel in their hand.

But in Heaven:

"You don't get this view down in the basement," said the demon.

Of course not, it's a basement – they aren't particularly **known** for their breathtaking vistas.

Crowley watched with dawning horror as the imp opened a small black cauldron and threw a sizable quantity of Hell-fire into a stone circle that had been prepared to receive it.

Oh... you... bastards.

You would have tried to **burn** _ **my angel.**_

And in Hell:

"That's holy water," Aziraphale-as-Crowley said, dying inside.

"The holiest."

To the angel's utter shock, Hastur picked up the little round bat-winged creature and dumped it in the bathtub where it screamed the entire time as it died, melting into nothingness. The water remained inviolate.

"Demon Crowley: I sentence you to extinction by holy water."  
  
You would have tried to **destroy** _ **my demon!**_

"Have you anything to say?"

Aziraphale's brain won the nanosecond races again.

"Well, yes. Um... this is a new jacket, and I'd hate to ruin it. Do you mind if I take it off?"

In Heaven:

"So, with one act of treason, you averted the war."

"Well, I think the greater good --"

"Don't talk to me about the greater good, sunshine --"

Don't call my angel "sunshine".

"-- I'm the Archangel fucking Gabriel."

Crowley shut his mouth; no matter what side you were on, if they wanted your opinion they would give it to you. Nothing ever changed.

Uriel lunged toward him very suddenly; Crowley flinched but all she did was unbind his wrists from the chair. "Up."

Crowley in the Appearance of his angel stood to his feet, settling his jacket, adjusting his waistcoat, straightening his tie.

"I don't suppose I can persuade you to reconsider?" he asked, and gave his best seraphic smile. Aziraphale would want to know, later. Did you ask for Heaven's mercy? he would say. "We're meant to be the good guys, for Heaven's sake."  
  
I did, he would answer his beloved.

"Well, for Heaven's sake, we are meant to make examples out of traitors. So..."

It went about as well as last time.

"Into the flame."

No trial or even a mockery of one. No offer of the option to simply Fall from grace. No final saving word or gesture from the Metatron, or from God Herself. No last minute ram caught in a thicket by his thorns, to provide the sacrifice.

Crowley contemplated the Hell-fire, pretending the fear that Aziraphale might have felt on approaching them.

(ignoring the quivering in his own heart that screamed over and over – **this**! they meant **this** to be **his** fate!)

"Right! Well... lovely knowing you all. May we meet on a better occasion."

"Shut your stupid mouth and die already."

Crowley felt the heat of the flames on his face; it must have been the flames because instantly it seemed as if every centimeter of his skin was burning up, even to the roots of his hair.

Should you come for us after this, he vowed – there will be no such thing as mercy for **you** in my soul, **or** in his.

His tongue thrashed inside his cheeks; he kept it there. If I can keep from licking the little line in the center of Aziraphale's forehead for six thousand years I can hold my rage in check for five more seconds...

He stepped into the conflagration and let it consume him.

In Hell:

There was a sizzling effect each time Aziraphale splashed some water against the massive windows; it must be coming into contact with some sort of demonic residue.

"I don't suppose that anywhere in the nine circles of Hell," he drawled, dashing his hand back and forth in the water, "there's such a thing as a rubber duck? No?"

In Heaven:

Crowley stood in the flames that purified but did not consume him – _"Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina..."_   Wasn't that Dante? The demon sighed and popped his neck; now **t** **here** was a man who knew something about pining...

He opened his eyes to a most unlovely sight: three perplexed angels glancing back and forth between their failed obliteration attempt and each other. He opened his mouth and roared like a dragon. The Hell-fire danced on his breath and the celestial beings scuttled back from it.

"It may be worse than we thought," said Gabriel.

And in Hell:

"He's gone native," said Beelzebub. "He isn't one of us anymore."

Aziraphale splashed around carelessly, glad that some instinct or a message from Somebody had prompted him to devise some sort of underclothing for Crowley's Appearance, as the demon had apparently forsaken proper pants starting some time back in the 1960's.

Starting to get chilly and more than a little bored, the angel flung droplets of water more deadly than bullets at the crowd crammed in behind the viewing glass.

("What is he?" Uriel asked in Heaven; "Aziraphale" smirked in a way the angel certainly never had.)

"So, you're probably thinking: 'if he can do this, I wonder what else he can do?' And very very soon, you're all going to get the chance to find out."

Hastur, having recovered in the slightest from his own dismay, tried to call "Crowley" out for his bluffing. Beelzebub, not near so much a fool, took control of the room again and sent the rubber-neckers back into their relevant pits of Hell.

The elevator dinged again; Michael returned with the pitcher.

"I came to bring back the, uh – Oh. Lord."

"Michael! Duuuuuuude. Do us a quick miracle, will you? I need a bath towel."

The Archangel produced one unthinkingly and handed it over; their expression was one of someone who had been briskly, repeatedly, and without warning, slapped in the face with a small trout.

"Crowley" put his feet in the water at last, keeping his grimace about wet socks entirely internal – the better to issue a final warning now that all the shouting was over. "I think it would be better for everyone if I were to be left alone in the future... don't you?"

He nodded convincingly; Beelzebub, quite against her will, nodded back. Dagon and Hastur nodded. Aziraphale looked at Michael and they too reluctantly nodded.

"Right," he said, and permitted himself a brief nose-wrinkle of glee.

Crowley-as-Aziraphale was the first to arrive in Berkeley Square – where else would they have met, after surviving the end of the world and the wrath of their Hosts?

He slumped on the bench, wanting to scrub his face and rub his knuckles into his aching eyes, knowing that he couldn't yet. What he wanted most of all was a nice long nap. Not a few decades, maybe, but at least a few hours. Last time he'd slept was days before the Apocalypse and, while holding Aziraphale while **he** slept was both wonderful and fairly restful, it wasn't quite the same.

And trying to look around while trying to look like you're not looking around is exhausting.

So, all things combined, seeing himself appear at the far edge of the square made him feel wobbly for a moment. The distant "Crowley" smiled though, in a way that he himself never could.

There was a few seconds where the bond between them opened up again, in a completely wordless exchange of warm affectionate sentiment and _yes?/okay/not hurt?/no fine_ assurance on both sides.

Then "Crowley" strutted up to the bench and sat down primly in the open seat. My hips do **not** swing that far, the demon groused. It looks like he's trying to hit either side of a narrow hallway as he walks through it.

"Do you think they'll leave us alone now?" he said instead, hearing his voice start to slip.

"At a guess, they'll pretend it never happened."

"Hmm."

"Right. Anyone looking?"

Crowley held his fingertips against his mildly throbbing temples, scanning Above and Below as only a Fallen angel could.

"Nobody... Right. Swap back, then."

He held out his hand to his angel, who took it immediately. As if there had never been so much as a moment he would have hesitated to do so.

They traded Appearances, with Aziraphale miracling his clothing away from underneath and feeling abruptly naked. Crowley, who was used to sitting under one illusion or another, felt not terribly different. They settled everything back into its proper place, having stretched or shrunken to fit in for the better part of a full day now.

"A tartan collar. Really," said Crowley, fingering his regular red.

Oh! He noticed! "Tartan is stylish!" the angel protested.

And everything was back, practically to normal.

The new normal... or the old one?

Crowley immediately had a sinking, suspicious feeling. He clung to his composure, constricting around it in his mind. This was a victory. We won. No matter what: don't ruin it.

"Right. Time to leave the garden. Let me tempt you to a spot of lunch?"

The angel wriggled in his seat charmingly. "Temptation accomplished!"

They sauntered vaguely off in the direction of the Ritz. No one was watching – but Crowley's hands were properly back in his own pockets, and Aziraphale's were folded as usual behind his back.

The demon watched indulgently as his angel ordered a half-dozen little trifles and delicacies; for his money he ordered the wine. He might very well need it. The fatigue hung on his shoulders like a hair shirt.

The waiter came back with the bottle, and poured Aziraphale's glass first. He read the table right at least, Crowley thought.

"I'd like to think," the angel said as he raised the glass, "none of this would have worked out if you weren't, at heart, just a little bit a good person."

Crowley's glass was filled and the waiter faded back again.

"And if you weren't, deep down, just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing."

Aziraphale smiled and it reached all the way to his gaze, which flicked away and back quickly. Perhaps just the slightest hint of a blush graced his cheeks. Crowley felt a stir of something like hope. "Cheers," he said. "To the world."

"To the world," Aziraphale breathed, and touched his glass to the demon's.

And, for the first time that Crowley could recall, they both ate as they sat. Crowley wanted something to do with his hands, something to feel and taste and experience. He wanted this moment to last as long as it could, where they felt safe and victorious and the world and each other were saved.

No matter what happened tonight, tomorrow, next century.

He wanted to savor how Aziraphale talked with animation, leaning toward him, reaching across the table as he gestured, as if Crowley were quite the most interesting conversational companion instead of an exhausted and somewhat tipsy demon.

They even had the first of what would probably be several discussions about their recent experiences with their opposite Hosts – "They were like some bizarre... sort of... Disney villains!" "Oh my Somebody, they completely were Disney villains!"

(Both of them had claimed Disney as a success over the last century; both of them had hedged very carefully in their reports as to **why**.)

And, just as Crowley was thinking that if he were lucky perhaps he could get Aziraphale to agree to a night-cap glass of brandy back at the bookshop before the demon took a cab and went home (of course, as he always did) – he felt something slowly caressing up his leg.

He blinked rapidly for several seconds, a disconcerting feeling for an entity who used to be very serpentish.

Then he tugged his sun-glasses down just the tiniest increment and gazed at the angel over the top of them. An angel who unapologetically returned the look, and who did not withdraw his stockinged foot from the demon's calf.

"You know, I **had** wondered," said Crowley, as if in answer.

"Last night you asked me if I trusted you. And I did – I put all my trust in you. At last. And my trust was rewarded in... in a way that it's never been rewarded before, in anyone else. For the first time I understood, **fully** understood, that in your own way you risked as much as I did... and that you had waited for so long for me to be ready for something you already experienced...

"I ask you, my dear: please trust me now. There's no going back, and I don't want there to be. All I want is to be here, with you."

"Here, necessarily?" asked the drowsy demon.

"We could go back to my place..." The angel forked the last bit of cherry divinity from Crowley's plate into his mouth as Crowley gestured for the check.

Being ethereal (or occult) meant you could get service with even more alacrity in a place like this; in a moment they were being bowed out the front door. The demon swiveled in place on the top step, looking for his Bentley – remembering his Bentley was back at the flat, and tripping over his feet as Aziraphale hailed a cab. His beloved angel caught him effortlessly in one arm, lifting and half-carrying him down the front stairs to the car door that opened by itself to welcome them.

Aziraphale gave the address to the cabby as he settled Crowley into his seat, fastening his seat-belt.

"You really aren't doing well, are you?" he murmured under his breath as the cab pulled away from the kerb, leaning in so close that Crowley was soon more drunk on his proximity than the wine.

"'M just a bit tired. Need a nap."

"You'll have it, my dear," and then his angel's arm was around him, drawing him in.

The ride was over in instants; Crowley realized he must have nodded out with his temple resting against Aziraphale's. The celestial being managed everything with such economy of motion that Crowley was soon inside the bookshop and headed down the narrow back hallway (his arm slung over the angel's shoulders, the better to bear him along) before he realized what was happening.

The "Staff Only" door opened for both of them. "Everything you love is in here," the demon heard himself say, as Aziraphale leaned him against the wall long enough to hang his jacket on its hook.

The angel turned to him with a smile that seemed practically as bright as the sun. "Now it is, yes." He bent and helped the demon off with his snake-skin shoes, then squired him up the ladder and followed close behind.

Crowley fell into a feather mattress that took him into its depths; he was barely aware of Aziraphale shimmying in, pulling a duvet over the both of them, reaching beyond Crowley's shoulder to touch the bitten jacket's lapel with loving wonder.

He slept.

His dreams were of a dark ocean in whose depths he rocked; when he stirred, the tide caressed his face. When his body curled around some anxiety he couldn't quite consciously understand, the cool deep currents soothed it away.

He came to rest on primordial sands that had never seen a beam of light.

When he woke, careful and slow, he found his head was on Aziraphale's shoulder. A cover was over them but the nest had changed – they were now back in Crowley's pocket universe, underneath the Bedouin tent and the endless starry night.

"You murmured in your sleep," the angel whispered. "You said it wasn't safe enough. Seemed best to bring you here than wake you, trying to convince you."

The demon wrapped his arm around Aziraphale and found where his velvet waistcoat made a gap above the band of his trousers and snaked his hand into it. The warmth of the angel's skin radiated through the thin linen of his shirt.

Aziraphale's fingers caressed Crowley's scalp through his hair. "This place reminds me a bit of the bed-tent of my first ever lover, my first teacher in the arts of love."

Crowley's fingers wriggled slowly higher. "How many lovers... have you had?"

The angel chuckled. "Do you want a ball-park figure?"

"Sure."

"More than a ball-park. Will that... be an issue?"

"I don't think so. Just something I had wondered. Your first teacher – what were they like?"

Aziraphale exhaled slowly, as if he'd been holding his breath. "She was... kind. She had hazel eyes. She showed me how to pleasure her body, and gave me my first ever orgasm."

"She?"

"Yes. I started with women first, since it seemed the done thing."

"How many teachers did you have?"

"Well... really, in their own way, all of them were my teachers. Each person liked something slightly different from the ones before. Each one was unique."

Crowley felt a surge of jealousy at the wonder in Aziraphale's voice and let it pass; that was before, this is now. "To think," he said lightly, "that you are the one who has taught me nearly everything I like."

"Nearly everything?" his angel laughed.

Crowley took this as his invitation: he began to describe the practice he'd found that so moved him. Although some people called it "tantric" it seemed to have little in common with the actual Tantras and Sutras he'd read so far. At best, the texts may have been poorly translated. Yet he thought more and more that it was less the roots and more the result that mattered the most.

And he went on to explain that it was the union of two partners of opposite but reciprocal energy, in every possible sense. Foreplay that extended for hours, the gradual touching that gradually aroused; it was the conscious control of both breathing and of sexual desire that made one able to delay orgasm as long as one wanted. Perhaps even having sexual union without orgasming whatsoever, feeding that energy back into each other's soul.

"And I thought it was interesting, when you described your vow," he finished. "That it could be a thing that we do together."

He realized then that his angel's muscles were tense, and he faltered to a stop. There was a moment of silence.

"You thought," said Aziraphale. His tone was flat.

Crowley pulled back, curious, to look up into his face.

Aziraphale's eyes were not simply storm-clouded; this was the dark swirling killer whirlwind of a hurricane, centered around each pupil. Crowley had **never** seen anything like this in him ever before.

"Get on your knees," the angel commanded coldly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina..." This line is in reference to [Dante's portrayal of Arnaut Daniel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaut_Daniel), a 12th century troubadour he represents as being in Purgatory for the sin of Lust. Dante also permits him to speak his own language in the Divine Comedy as a sign of respect, and calls him "il miglior fabbro" -- the superior craftsman.
> 
> Only [seventeen of Arnaut's works](http://www.trobar.org/troubadours/arnaut_daniel/) survive today... one of them being [an epic rap battle with another poet regarding the subject of anilingus.](http://www.trobar.org/troubadours/arnaut_daniel/arnaut_daniel_07.php) Proving that people have always been people.
> 
> Dante, incidentally, [pined so hard for a woman he met a grand total of TWICE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Portinari) that he changed the face of Western love poetry forever (and wrote one of the most epic biblical fanfics/political commentaries) because of her. Mad props.
> 
> You're damn right I'm dragging every Western depiction of pining into this story; you're lucky I'm not getting all bitten peach or cut sleeve up in here too. Hell, the night is still young.
> 
> In the 1960's when Aziraphale gave Crowley the holy water, he straight up decided to quit wearing underwear. MY BODY IS READY.
> 
> Waiters generally pour for the ladies first; Crowley thinks the waiter "read" the table correctly. Hmmm.
> 
> Aziraphale's also a lot physically stronger than he lets on. Unf.
> 
> As for the thing that Aziraphale does with his eyes and face, I'd say that [Ian Holm](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000453/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm) can do something very similar; I've seen him do it in "From Hell" (aided by contacts) and in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He turns from a relatively harmless older gentleman into something very remote, cold, and potentially dangerous -- with just a change of expression. If every demon was once an angel now Fallen, that must mean that every angel has within them the potential to be demonic...


	8. Rising Above

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is sharing this for the first time with someone, with anyone, Crowley thought as Aziraphale's hand came up under his jaw, raising his chin.
> 
> He is sharing this, for the first time ever – with me.
> 
> “Open your mouth,” said that cold, calm voice.

Crowley's sinuous body moved to obey before his brain could finish translating the words – flowing with unconscious grace to have him kneeling on the hand-knotted rug in the center of the desert, sitting back on his heels with his palms resting flat on his thighs and his spine straight.

Aziraphale followed as swift as eagles not even a millisecond after, standing uncomfortably close, looming over him, staring down with those great doom-shrouded blue eyes.

I've never ever seen him like this, Crowley thought – and his conscious mind caught up at last.

You've never seen it and **never** has anyone else... but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, it thought. It's not safe to have any sort of feelings in Hell, and it's not safe to have these **specific** feelings in Heaven either.

So he goes somewhere quiet and has all those feelings out inside his head and never shows them to anyone. He doesn't ask, expect, or **trust** anyone to help him with them. He stays alone and deals with them, and doesn't permit himself back in company until he has it under control or else they've faded into background noise.

He is sharing this for the first time with someone, with anyone, Crowley thought as Aziraphale's hand came up under his jaw, raising his chin.

 **He** is **sharing** this, for the first time ever – with **me**.

"Open your mouth," said that cold, calm voice.

Crowley lifted his gaze to Aziraphale's face, his slitted golden eyes alight with love. He parted his lips as directed.

Aziraphale let the Appearance of clothing vanish, and stood completely naked before his demon. Taking a half-step forward he thrust his growing erection into Crowley's mouth.

Then he sighed softly, as if he'd quenched a raging fire in a bucket of ice water – if only temporarily. His hand found the back of Crowley's head and held him there... but the demon wasn't planning on going anywhere. He held his angel in mouth and eyes, understanding all, receiving all, in a state of submissive bliss.

"In the last few years I've had some time to think," murmured Aziraphale in what was nearly a conversational voice. "I've had quite a bit of time to think. And I thought back to the very beginning. I've had two hundred fifty thousand four hundred and seven lovers, not counting you. No, keep your hands on your legs," he cautioned gently, seeing Crowley moving as if to reach to hold his thighs or hips, "only use your mouth."

And he thrust once, slowly in, pulling slowly out.

"That speed and no faster, not unless I tell you that you can speed up."

Crowley did as bid; he wrapped the entirety of his tongue around his beloved's cock and, since it only won him a sharp glance and not a cease-and-desist order, he gave it the long slow lick that only a serpentine being could. Speaking of serpentine – his first time experiencing the angel's genitals (directly or indirectly) and he was impressed. He didn't have to unhinge his jaw entirely but was glad it remained an option; cracking it a bit on either side seemed to relieve the strain of having to hold it so far open.

Aziraphale leaned his head back, staring up at the fabric roof of the tent and recollecting his thoughts.

"Two hundred fifty thousand four hundred and seven lovers, not counting you – that makes for an average of one new lover nearly each week. And that's lovers, mind you, not sexual experiences. A virgin would have to fuck a new person every single day for approximately six hundred and eighty-six years to catch up to me.

"Some lovers were with me for a while. One or two," and here the Bedouin fabric blurred in his vision, "even stayed for some years."

He looked down again and the tears were nowhere to be seen, but he still had Crowley's full attention.

"Across five thousand years I was quite accustomed to having sex." He pulled back slowly and thrust in again. "Having orgasms." Again. "Quite a few of them." Again. "Practically countless."

A tiny portion of Crowley's mind that sat in as intrigued observer to this one-sided conversation mentioned he might should consider growing his hair out again, maybe just to the late 2000's era man-bun he'd sported for a while. Not fashionable at the moment but it would give his angel more to hold onto...

"And then there's you," his lover purred. He swallowed hard and closed his eyes, leaning back again. "There's always been you but just a little over four years ago, the first time I get even half of a proper taste of you – I was utterly ruined."

The smell of pine disinfectant and wood polish and old mop-water. Seven minutes in hell.

Aziraphale's other hand caressed the curve of Crowley's ear.

"You could say I loved them," he continued at last, with a sigh. "Angels love everyone – but we're not infinite like God is. So such love necessarily turns out to be a bit impersonal. I loved each of my lovers like I loved the waiters who brought me a tasty plate of crêpes, and for just about as long."

He pulled the demon onto himself again and Crowley thanked Somebody that breathing was optional. He wouldn't have missed this for the world, wouldn't have stopped for all the tea in China. He watched Aziraphale's face from below the gentle curve of his abdomen, in utter surrender.

"And then there's you... and I'm completely destroyed. All of a sudden I don't want any of them. I don't want anyone else to touch me. I want to come – I tried for ages to make myself come. I tried everything. And I just couldn't. Or wouldn't.

"And then I was starving, dying of hunger in a grocery shop of things I couldn't and wouldn't eat, longing for the one morsel that would satisfy. If you like tantric sex so much, control yourself now. You may become aroused but do not orgasm."

He looked down at Crowley, exhaled hard and looked up again. Crowley kept his hands on his thighs and his mouth open, his tongue moving in a counter-clockwise spiral on the part of his lover that he had received.

"I thought of all of them, you know. In those last four years. I remember all their names. I remember all their faces... and when I layered all those faces over each other in my mind, all two hundred fifty thousand four hundred and seven of them, the amalgam was your own. You. My beautiful demon!"

Aziraphale was himself moving faster now, holding Crowley in a vice-grip. Crowley merely set his back and shoulders and braced.

"I vowed 'not without you, not ever again'," the angel clarified. As if Crowley had asked. "But now you're here. Doesn't mean you have to come, or that I can't orgasm without you also coming. Just means you must be present somehow."

The angel turned his face down now, eyes closed. "Crowley."

The demon turned the spiral clockwise and made the smallest noise of inquiry, far back in his throat.

"I want to come."

Ahh, there we are at last – the crux of this cold-burning rage, the heart of this dark star.

Some Fallen angels know when disobedience is actually the correct – or perhaps even singular – course of action. He lifted his hands and cradled Aziraphale's hips lovingly in them, holding him close.

You're not getting away now. Never again.

His fingers knit in Crowley's close-cut crimson hair, he leaned back once more. The demon felt the low tremor that racked his frame. Even in a moment so ravenous and desperate as this the angel would not rush. He permitted himself a low moaning cry as his orgasm pulsed and poured down the back of Crowley's throat. Crowley caressed the bare skin of his flanks as he took it all.

He wanted to hold him still, in his mouth, feel him grow lax and replete, but the angel pulled back far enough to disengage. Looking down at his lover's mouth, at his shoulders, at his mussed hair - not quite meeting his eyes.

Crowley licked his swollen lips with the first fifth or so of his tongue, settling his jaw back into place on both sides.

"You've waited so long to be touched again," the demon answered, as if continuing the conversation. "Over four years now. I'd bet you've counted the minutes, the seconds." The angel nodded but did not speak. "And just as your tired little demon wakes up from his nap and you think it might finally be your turn to get some release, what does he do first but suggest **recreational** orgasm denial?"

"Angels are made to give, and to love, asking for nothing in return... for so long. Forever. Angels are supposed to be selfless, to give no matter what, to give it all. But I'm not infinite like God and I know it. Eventually, I run out... of things I have to give..."

Crowley rose to his feet, wrapping Aziraphale close in one arm and with the other hand he wiped his falling tears away, kissing his cheek, kissing his eyelids. "Let it all out, my beloved. Let it all out here and now."

The angel curled inwards in the sanctity of the demon's embrace, clenching around millennia of pain and longing and loneliness, and wept without restraint.

He's never done _**THIS**_ with anyone either, said Crowley's heart smugly.

Crowley stretched Aziraphale back into the nest of pillows and blankets, a gestalt of the collection that had been here as well as that in the angel's own bed, congenially mingled. He banished his own illusion of clothing with a thought, and brought his beloved angel's head to rest on his chest.

"I'm sorry," the celestial being said after a while. "I'm so sorry."

"For what, angel?"

"Your first time – and I was horrible to you."

Crowley grinned affectionately. "First of all, it wasn't my first time."

"It wasn't?!" Crowley chuckled at the affront in Aziraphale's voice; there was no quicker way to get his mind off whatever mood he was in than to contradict him on some minor point.

"Of course not," he answered. "I remember my first time quite well. Couldn't ever forget it. So, me and my angel had just been chased into a closet by a fat-headed bastard of a seraph --"

"Crowley!"

"And then he held me in his arms," Crowley crooned. "He could feel I was terrified of quite a few things, see. I had loved him so long and tried to show it in so many ways, but I'd not ever experienced this particular one, see. So he embraced me and he stroked my face. Kissed me, all over. He even," and here his voice dropped to a whisper, "played with my cock through my trousers!"

Despite himself, Aziraphale giggled.

"Then that night when I'm alone and I've no idea of what to do or how to find some relief from what I was experiencing, he comes into my head, looks through my eyes, and shows me how to make love to myself. And I start thinking of how to love him back in the ways that he showed me. That was my very first time, angel.

"Annnnnnd second of all, you weren't horrible to me just now. Not one bit."

"But I did the scary thing!"

Citrine gaze met azure; Crowley smiled and stroked the worried lines at the corners of Aziraphale's eyes.

"You mean, that thing that hardly anyone else sees you do – unless you don't care about destroying them. You mean, that display of some sort of transgressive and unheavenly emotion that would have gotten you into so much trouble elsewhere. You mean, that revealing of your true internal state alongside the power of a seraphic being, the reason that angels generally introduce themselves with 'Fear not.' You mean that thing?"

"Yeah," Aziraphale pouted.

"You don't scare me, angel. You can't. For me, fearing you would be like... fearing the warmth of the sun."

"But the sun can burn you!"

"So I respect it, not fear it." He took Aziraphale's limp hand in his, kissed the back of his knuckles. "And besides that... it's quite sexy."

The celestial being considered this for a long moment.

"The sun is sexy?"

Crowley chuckled.

"No, beloved – that darkness that comes into your eyes when that mood hits you. The way that you command and something in me just answers. The way that those two sides of us mesh so well. All of that is sexy."

"... it is?"

"Dear Somebody, yes! But if you really feel guilty and you want to make it up to me..." His lips curved in a wicked grin.

"Anything," he answered promptly.

"That's a massive blank check you're writing me, angel. You haven't even heard it yet."

"I don't care. Whatever you want."

Crowley eased out from under Aziraphale, pushing him gently down in the spot where he'd lain. "From very nearly the start, long before I understood sex or why humans found it so dreadfully important – I've wanted to simply splay you out and explore you. Every bit of you, in every way that I can."

The angel wiggled down in the pillows, spread-eagled. "Like this?"

His demon studied him from a kneeling height. "Very much so. The only thing missing is the crimson silk sheets."

"We could make that happen." Crowley had never seen Aziraphale so eager to please him; the switch made for a bit of a heady rush.

"Not necessary. This is perfect, just as it is."

Crowley leaned out and planted his fists on the ground to either side of Aziraphale's frame, slipping between his thighs so he could lean down and nuzzle into the hollow between neck and shoulder. The angel's hands came up to hold him lightly in return.

"There's another thing about that moment before, that so disturbed you."

"Mmmm?"

Crowley inhaled his lover's delicious scent, kissing up the side of his throat, flicking the slender forked tip of his tongue into the space behind his ear – all these wondrous voids of the body, each holding a slightly different seraphic perfume like a goblet filled to the brim with aetheric nectar.

He would sample every single one.

"I've seen plenty of people – both demons and humans – lose their tempers, over the years. I've seen very few people keep their control as you did. And it's vanishingly rare that I am able to show someone tenderness; even rarer to have it be accepted.

"I could see you, in the moment of your emotion, and accept all of it and all of you. And I could let you see me seeing you. D'you know what I mean?"

Aziraphale sighed, cupping the back of Crowley's head as he moved to the little dip between his collarbones. "I think I do. There is Good in Heaven... but very little tenderness."

"Tenderness is as transgressive among demons as your emotions would be among angels; I've wondered if humans invented it." He reared back onto his heels, lifted one of Aziraphale's unresisting feet in his hands, and passed the length of his tongue between the first and second toe.

"Even **there**?" the angel chortled.

"Even here, especially here. Every single part of you, I said."

He relaxed and let his demon do as he wished, even when the flickering tongue tickled the sensitive instep.

"You know in the Bible, feet are mentioned euphemistically as genitals," Aziraphale said. He folded his hands on his chest and glanced up at the tent overhead again.

"Crowley..."

"Mmmm?"

"What are we going to do?" A little pause. "I mean, we've made both sides both afraid and angry today – er, yesterday."

He talks when he's nervous, Crowley thought, nuzzling along the muscled underside of Aziraphale's right calf.

"We could fortify this place," he answered. "Make it better. Make it bigger. I've often wondered if perhaps... God did something like that. If She fled something horrible and made a world of Her own inside Herself, and angels to serve Her and humans to live in it."

"Huh," said Aziraphale, amazed at the idea.

"But we have a place, you and I. You can always get here in an instant as long as we're on the same plane together; there's no separating us now. It seems like the bond we have is growing stronger also. Sometimes we're able to hear each other when we aren't – ah, aroused."

"The jacket," the angel murmured, then flinched when Crowley brushed his hands up his thighs.

"Sensitive?" the demon asked with a devilish grin.

"Oooh, marvelously so!"

"I'll go slowly then..." His fingertips made little circles on both kneecaps, gently teasing the creamy white thighs that spread themselves as if in answer. Crowley glanced down to see his lover's cock stirring, growing thicker and firmer once more. Soon, he thought.

"The jacket," Aziraphale said again, contemplatively, even though his hips began to shimmy slowly at the stimulation. "But Saturday night the shop was burned and the jacket was destroyed."

"Then you're able to reach me now without it."

"Only with great concentration – the rest of the time the bond seems to come and go at a whim." Aziraphale's eyes narrowed.

"I have an idea. Crowley... what is it about you and biting?"

To the angel's everlasting delight, a sudden blush sprang up on his demon's sharp cheeks.

"I... uh..." He took a deep breath. "Whenever I experience... some sort of intense emotion, positive or negative, I get the urge to sink my teeth into something. Comes as having been a large snake for so much of the time, I've thought."

Aziraphale just watched him for a long moment. His expression was one of gentle amusement. Crowley came undone.

"I mean, when all you've got is a mouth, everything looks like something to bite, I suppose... From watching Animal Planet I learned that a lot of snakes tend to bite their mates... during the act..."

Aziraphale felt the jolt of arousal pass through him at the thought. Soon, he agreed – but first...

"Then that's the solution," he replied amiably, as if they were merely discussing where to have dinner. "You should bite me. Right here," and he pointed to the curve of muscle right where his neck joined his right shoulder.

" ...You're not serious."

"Do I look like I'm joking?" asked the naked angel lounging in the pillow nest with a fully-aroused member.

Crowley still seemed utterly aghast at the thought.

"Look – you bit my jacket lapel in a moment of passion – and from that one little act we've been united on a specific wavelength for over four years, whenever we've wanted to be. The problem is that the jacket is separate from me and, if something happens to it, the bond between us gets far more difficult to engage.

"So if you were to bite me instead of the jacket, I would have a part of you I could carry with me always. It would probably make it easier for me to speak with you over the bond – might make it easier and quicker for me to come to your pocket-dimension. Might even make it possible for me to reach you even if we're in different planes of existence; we'd have to test it out."

"But --" Crowley's mouth suddenly felt as dry as the desert around them... and as large... and as empty.

"And the very idea," Aziraphale continued, glancing down between their bodies, "seems to have had an effect on you too."

Crowley followed Aziraphale's gaze against his will. His own erection gave the opposing argument to his distress: that he did want to bite his lover.

He wanted it very much.

"But I'll hurt you," he whispered.

The angel's eyes were the bluest blue of the clearest midday sky.

"So do those chili pepper truffles that I like so much... and the hot spice only makes the chocolate taste sweeter. Do you understand how that could be so?"

The demon fought it a moment or so longer – but there was that song that the Bentley occasionally played: "Pain Is So Close To Pleasure." And how bland and tasteless an eternity of "The Sound of Music" might be...

And then there was the angel's hand on his cock, stroking its length, guiding him up over Aziraphale, whose gaze was only cloud touched when he whispered "Do it, darling..."

Dizzy and drunk on sensation and scent, Crowley leaned his mouth against the spot his lover indicated, kissing it, licking it. He opened his jaws and surrendered.

First a little pressure. He felt Aziraphale's hips shift again when the points of his teeth pricked the skin. But his fingers did not stop their work, and his other hand cradled Crowley's head close and lovingly.

Crowley bit.

Just far enough to break the skin under each sharp tooth. His pulse pounded in his ears as the blood oozed into his mouth, laced with celestial ichor. His tongue burned as he laved the torn flesh.

_Pain is so close to pleasure..._

He pulled back, licking his singed lips, to look his angel in the eyes.

Aziraphale was flushed, panting softly. His spine had arched somewhat, in the grip of those conflicting sensations. The little marks were already closing to thin red wounds. "Of all the times you will bite me," he breathed, "these will be the only ones that scar."

"Oh angel – now you can't ever go home again. Heaven will take one look at your flesh and know."

He reached up and cradled Crowley's face between both hands adoringly.

"I **am** home, my dearest. You've marked me as yours forevermore." Lips carmine with his own arousal he gazed up into beautiful golden eyes, feeling happier and more complete than he could ever remember being before. "Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you... Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried also. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me!"

Crowley ached all over, from head to toe, with a feeling that he finally had the words to describe. "I need you."

"Don't wait any more," the angel gasped and Crowley stopped his mouth with his own, tasting blood, tasting glory. His body slithered into place, straddling Aziraphale's hips eagerly. Two celestial immortal beings in human form – there was no need for mortal considerations of preparation. Crowley felt the tip of Aziraphale's cock at the opening of his body and wanted it, pressed back against it and bore it into himself.

Immediately filled, he felt the shuddering breath that became a sigh of relief, as Aziraphale had sighed on being wrapped in Crowley's mouth: yes, this is what I needed, it is sufficient. For now.

The tremor passed up his spine and seemed to convert it to something watery, he bent and rested his forehead against Aziraphale's.

"My love?"

"Just hold me, angel. Just hold me."

The feeling was intense, on nearly an existential level. Dazed, Crowley wished Aziraphale could bite him in return (pain to relieve the strange burden of this pleasure, agreed his heart) – to mark him in some way just as indelible. To mark him as owned.

But the angel's hands were traveling and his lips also, leaving kiss impressions and fingerprints that seemed to sear his skin. No one could look at me and not know, Crowley thought as he quivered like a leaf in a gale. No one could look at me now and not see his light shining from my flesh.

His kisses, over Crowley's cheeks and eyelids, down the bridge of his nose to his mouth and then to the tip of his jaw. His hands, stroking the cords in Crowley's throat and the ridges of his collarbones, evoking his nipples into hard little pebbles. It was all Crowley could do to hold himself up on trembling arms.

"Lay down; rest your head on my shoulder," commanded the angel, as if he knew how profound it all felt. He wanted to argue – won't my weight crush you? – then recalled that Aziraphale had practically carried him into the bookshop with hardly any effort, and simply obeyed.

Aziraphale felt his demon curl up atop him, his hand over Aziraphale's heart and his head pillowed on his non-bitten shoulder. Tenderness – yes, must have been a human invention. Why else would its sweetness burn in his belly like the chili pepper truffles?

He held Crowley's lanky frame in one arm, caressing up into his hair; the other hand he wrapped around his demon's erection. "Move with me slowly," he breathed.

And through the bond he promised more... ten thousand nights where they explored each other for hours. Ten million evenings that followed dinner and the opera with sports of a more personal flavor – where every bedroom game played and gentlemen's club experiment conducted would be introduced in their own time into this relationship that mattered most of all, the last, the ultimate...

You, answered Crowley silently, and this. This is all I want or need for now.

And his demon moved with him, tensing and flexing, then easing. Every time the tip of his cock caressed that spot inside him, Aziraphale experienced the frisson of emotion and sensation within Crowley's soul. That, compounded onto the incomparable feeling of being within his lover's body at last, became a heady draft that quite intoxicated.

"Oh love," he murmured, pressing a kiss to his forehead. "Oh, my dearest one!"

"Don't stop, angel," his demon gasped.

Four years of doing nothing more than watching and wanting, of urging him on with salacious words – now there seemed to be hardly any words left in either of them but Aziraphale's hand knew its business, plying Crowley with firm strokes along the entire length of his shaft, circling the head in his palm at the end of each pass.

"Please," the demon said.

"What?"

"Please!" he managed again, struggling to draw enough breath to respond intelligently. Aziraphale tapped the well of his sensation and understood.

"Yes! My love, come for me..."

Crowley arched and constricted, wriggling urgently between Aziraphale's hand and cock, pressing his blind face to Aziraphale's cheek as he panted through parted lips. He clenched around the angel's erection, eliciting a gasp – and Aziraphale was thrusting with purpose now, his heart racing.

There was no way to tell in whose body the climax sparked first; it jumped from one to the other so swiftly that there was no dividing the delicious anguish that took them both. No one to hear them here but God – Aziraphale cried out as he drove his orgasm home deep inside his demon's body, heard his demon sob his own pleasure as he spilled in Aziraphale's eager fist.

Swooning in the depths of the pillows, the angel saw a million stars exploding behind his eyelids. The birth of nebulas, he thought disjointedly. My lover – the maker of constellations in my soul.

Gazing at these unknowable starry skies, Aziraphale brought his hand to his mouth and licked it clean. He heard Crowley's exhausted chuckle.

"You taste... divine, my darling."

"You could eat me up?" The demon twisted his snaky hips, disengaging their bodies so that he could lay in the curve of his beloved's arm, nestled safely against his side.

"Every chance I get." And, knowing him so well, he lifted Crowley's chin then to look upon his gorgeous face and kiss away the tracks of his tears.

"'May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely,'" Crowley quoted softly, his golden eyes distant. "There's a possibility She might, very well."

Aziraphale caressed his cheek thoughtfully. "I have to believe that God knows all, and sees all that I do – loving you, wanting you. Being with you like this, here and now. And that, if She truly wanted to, she would stop me somehow."

The demon laughed once, soft and bitter. "Do you know how many souls Hell has caught with that line of sophistry?"

He kissed his supple lips again.

"Hell can't have my soul – it's already yours."

They curled into each other nonetheless, seeking and finding comfort in each other's warmth.

Eventually they slept.

Crowley woke first, immediately feeling that something was different in his little personal realm. He brought the lightest tinge of dawn around the horizon, just enough to see by.

Then, not believing what he saw, he carefully slithered out from under Aziraphale's arm and disentangled their legs so he could stand at the edge of the tent and look out into the desert.

A desert in name only for, as far as the eye could see across each dune, there stretched numerous thousands of little green plants that bore flowers of white and gold. Within the duration of their slumber the wasteland had bloomed.

Crowley leaned against the tent pole, feeling a tremendous silent awe. Water in a dry land... bringing forth life that had only waited quiescent for so many millennia.

" _Now no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth, nor had any plant of the field sprouted; for the Lord God had not yet sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But springs welled up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground..."_

The demon hitched a sigh. Something inside his soul eased at long last.

"If You're there... and You're listening... thank You."

There wasn't an answer, and Crowley hadn't really expected one. Then again, it didn't seem necessary.

Crowley let the night fall again, misty and full of life. Smiling, he returned to his bed and the angel within it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT IS FINISHED.
> 
> The Muse and I had to do some subconscious archaeology to find the notes that seemed to fulfill what these two wonderful boys would want as a loving conclusion, but I think we did manage it.
> 
> I believe that Crowley's into tantric sex as it seems to him to be some of the most emotional sex. I imagine him reading tantric sex books and watching videos and just turning into a big ball of blushing snake because it's so damn intense and he can't handle it.
> 
> Thank you everyone who has read, kudos'd, commented -- you've made my day each and every single time. I will continue to reply to comments as soon as I am able.
> 
> If you want more of my writing it can be found elsewhere online under my same screen name.
> 
> And it may go without saying but I want to express it explicitly (heh) -- if you want to make fan art or whatnot about my work, of any type whatsoever, PLEASE ABSOLUTELY DO IT! All I ask is that you link it in the comments so I can go look/listen/read/experience/whatever and squee over it!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Seven Minutes in Hell](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19876045) by [Literarion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Literarion/pseuds/Literarion)




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